Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema [2 ed.] 9781538119471, 9781538119488

Table of contents :
Contents
Editor’s Foreword
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Note
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Chronology
Introduction
THE DICTIONARY
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Appendix
Bibliography
About the Author

Citation preview

The historical dictionaries present essential information on a broad range of subjects, including American and world history, art, business, cities, countries, cultures, customs, film, global conflicts, international relations, literature, music, philosophy, religion, sports, and theater. Written by experts, all contain highly informative introductory essays of the topic and detailed chronologies that, in some cases, cover vast historical time periods but still manage to heavily feature more recent events. Brief A–Z entries describe the main people, events, politics, social issues, institutions, and policies that make the topic unique, and entries are cross-referenced for ease of browsing. Extensive bibliographies are divided into several general subject areas, providing excellent access points for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more. Additionally, maps, photographs, and appendixes of supplemental information aid high school and college students doing term papers or introductory research projects. In short, the historical dictionaries are the perfect starting point for anyone looking to research in these fields.

HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Jon Woronoff, Series Editor American Radio Soap Operas, by Jim Cox, 2005. Fantasy Literature, by Brian Stableford, 2005. Lesbian Literature, by Meredith Miller, 2006. Scandinavian Literature and Theater, by Jan Sjåvik, 2006. French Cinema, by Dayna Oscherwitz and MaryEllen Higgins, 2007. Australian Radio and Television, by Albert Moran and Chris Keating, 2007. Polish Cinema, by Marek Haltof, 2007. Old Time Radio, by Robert C. Reinehr and Jon D. Swartz, 2008. Postwar German Literature, by William Grange, 2009. Modern Japanese Literature and Theater, by J. Scott Miller, 2009. Modern Chinese Literature, by Li-hua Ying, 2010. Middle Eastern Cinema, by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard, 2010. Film Noir, by Andrew Spicer, 2010. French Theater, by Edward Forman, 2010. Choral Music, by Melvin P. Unger, 2010. Westerns in Literature, by Paul Varner, 2010. Surrealism, by Keith Aspley, 2010. Science Fiction Cinema, by M. Keith Booker, 2010. Children’s Literature, by Emer O’Sullivan, 2010. Latin American Literature and Theater, by Richard A. Young and Odile Cisneros, 2011. German Literature to 1945, by William Grange, 2011. American Cinema, by M. Keith Booker, 2011. American Theater: Contemporary, by James Fisher, 2011. English Music: ca. 1400–1958, by Charles Edward McGuire and Steven E. Plank, 2011. Rococo Art, by Jennifer D. Milam, 2011. Japanese Cinema, by Jasper Sharp, 2011. Russian Music, by Daniel Jaffé, 2012. Music of the Classical Period, by Bertil van Boer, 2012. Holocaust Cinema, by Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer, 2012. Asian American Literature and Theater, by Wenjing Xu, 2012. Beat Movement, by Paul Varner, 2012. Jazz, by John S. Davis, 2012. Crime Films, by Geoff Mayer, 2013. Scandinavian Cinema, by John Sundholm, Isak Thorsen, Lars Gustaf Andersson, Olof Hedling, Gunnar Iversen, and Birgir Thor Møller, 2013. Chinese Cinema, by Tan Ye and Yun Zhu, 2013.

Taiwan Cinema, by Daw-Ming Lee, 2013. Russian Literature, by Jonathan Stone, 2013. Gothic Literature, by William Hughes, 2013. French Literature, by John Flower, 2013. Baroque Music, by Joseph P. Swain, 2013. Opera, by Scott L. Balthazar, 2013. British Cinema, by Alan Burton and Steve Chibnall, 2013. Romantic Music, by John Michael Cooper with Randy Kinnett, 2013. British Theatre: Early Period, by Darryll Grantley, 2013. South American Cinema, by Peter H. Rist, 2014. African American Television, Second Edition, by Kathleen Fearn-Banks and Anne Burford-Johnson, 2014. Japanese Traditional Theatre, Second Edition, by Samuel L. Leiter, 2014. Romanticism in Literature, by Paul Varner, 2015. American Theater: Beginnings, by James Fisher, 2016. African American Cinema, Second Edition, by S. Torriano Berry and Venise Berry, 2015. British Radio, Second Edition, by Seán Street, 2015. German Theater, Second Edition, by William Grange, 2015. Russian Theater, Second Edition, by Laurence Senelick, 2015. Broadway Musical, Second Edition, by William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, 2016. British Spy Fiction, by Alan Burton, 2016. Russian and Soviet Cinema, Second Edition, by Peter Rollberg, 2016. Architecture, Second Edition, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2016. Renaissance Art, Second Edition, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2016. Sacred Music, Second Edition, by Joseph P. Swain, 2016. U.S. Latino Literature, by Francisco A. Lomelí, Donaldo W. Urioste, and María Joaquina Villaseñor, 2017. Postmodernist Literature and Theater, Second Edition, by Fran Mason, 2017. Contemporary Art, by Ann Lee Morgan, 2017. Popular Music, by Norman Abjorensen, 2017. American Theater: Modernism, Second Edition, by James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré, 2017. Horror Cinema, Second Edition, by Peter Hutchings, 2018. Australian and New Zealand Cinema, Second Edition, by Karina Aveyard , Albert Moran, and Errol Vieth, 2018. Baroque Art and Architecture, Second Edition, by Lilian H. Zirpolo, 2018. African American Theater, Second Edition, by Anthony D. Hill, 2018. German Cinema, Second Edition, by Robert C. Reimer and Carol J. Reimer, 2019. Leonard Bernstein, by Paul R. Laird and Hsun Lin, 2019. Romantic Art and Architecture, Second Edition, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2019. Irish Cinema, Second Edition, by Roderick Flynn and Tony Tracy, 2019.

Woody Allen, by William Brigham, 2019. Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition, by Nicole V. Gagné, 2019. Sherlock Holmes, by Neil McCaw, 2019. Spanish Cinema, Second Edition, by Alberto Mira, 2019. Hong Kong Cinema, Second Edition, by Rachel Braaten and Lisa Odham Stokes, 2019. Chinese Theater, Second Edition, by Tan Ye, 2020. Animation and Cartoons, Second Edition, by Nichola Dobson, 2020. Neoclassical Art and Architecture, Second Edition, by Allison Lee Palmer, 2020. Science Fiction Cinema, Second Edition, by M. Keith Booker, 2020. Italian Cinema, Second Edition, by Gino Moliterno, 2021.

Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema Second Edition

Gino Moliterno

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2021 by Gino Moliterno All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moliterno, Gino, 1951– author. Title: Historical dictionary of Italian cinema / Gino Moliterno. Description: Second edition. | Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, [2020] | Series: Historical dictionaries of literature and the arts | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on major movements, directors, actors, actresses, film genres, producers, industry organizations and key films”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019057107 (print) | LCCN 2019057108 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538119471 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538119488 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Italy—Dictionaries. | Motion pictures—Italy—History—Dictionaries. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I88 M56 2020 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.I88 (ebook) | DDC 791.430945/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057107 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057108

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Patricia, in memory, and Peter B. (naturally)

Contents

Editor’s Foreword

xi

Preface to the Second Edition

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

Reader’s Note

xvii

Acronyms and Abbreviations

xix

Chronology

xxi

Introduction

1

THE DICTIONARY

23

Appendix: Winners at the Venice Festival and of the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento Prizes

523

Bibliography

649

About the Author

715

ix

Editor’s Foreword

Italy was one of the first places where cinema emerged, and there are few other countries where it has flourished more spectacularly. Despite crises and being overshadowed by mass production from Hollywood, Italian cinema has constantly reinvented itself in an amazing variety of forms, including neorealism, which have spread worldwide. Its production is amazingly broad, from outright trash to the very finest art films—a steady flow of quite ordinary popular films but also specialties such as commedia all’italiana and Spaghetti Westerns. Many have gone on to win awards and appear on alltime-great lists, including some that are so universal—and so Italian—that they are known worldwide under their Italian names, such a La strada, La dolce vita, and Padre padrone. This second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema is an informative guide for both those who simply enjoy watching Italian films and those who study the genre more closely. Italian cinema’s long history is charted in the chronology and the introduction, but the dictionary section— with hundreds of entries on directors, producers, and actors; major studios and film companies; characteristic genres and themes; and memorable films—is where readers will spend the most time. The book concludes with an appendix of award winners and a bibliography, which readers can use to find many other sources. The author, Gino Moliterno, was born in Italy and has had an abiding interest in Italian cinema for several decades. After teaching Italian language and literature at a number of Australian and New Zealand universities, he joined the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, where he taught in—and served for many years as the convener of—the Italian Studies Program. In the mid-1990s, he helped establish the Film Studies Program at the ANU, in which he taught and periodically headed prior to his retirement. He has lectured extensively on Italian cinema and was the general editor and contributing author to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture (2000). In this historical dictionary, he presents a broad and deep introduction to one of the most prolific contributors to world cinema. Jon Woronoff Series Editor

xi

Preface to the Second Edition

In the decade and a half since the publication of the first edition of this dictionary, the Italian cinema has continued to figure as one of the leading cinemas of Europe. As the last surviving veteran directors of the 1960s have inevitably passed on, the filmmakers and actors who emerged in the so-called New Italian Cinema of the 1990s have themselves become veterans and been able to produce some of their most mature work. At the same time, they have been joined by a new generation of young directors making their impressive first films. Italian films have again been nominated for Academy Awards with one succeeding in winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Additionally, the interchange between cinema and television has moved to a new level whereby many leading directors are regularly working in both media. The period has also seen an increasing number of women take the helm in the production of both films and television, as well as more films made by women about women. With immigration continuing to be a burning issue, films dealing with migration have become something of a genre of their own. Given such continuity and change at the same time, we have seized the opportunity granted by the augmented space of a new edition to not only update existing entries but also to add 80 new entries in order to provide English readers with a comprehensive and accurate picture of the state of cinema in Italy at the present time. Given the limitations of the series’ singlevolume format and the need to select from an almost unlimited number of possible inclusions, closing some gaps will undoubtedly have opened others. Nevertheless, we continue to hope that by our own strategic selection and the dictionary’s internal cross-referencing of entries, enough of such a vast area has effectively been covered to provide the non-Italian reader with a useful and accurate guide to one of the truly great cinemas of the world.

xiii

Acknowledgments

Many people have encouraged and supported me in producing the present volume. I would like to thank Professor Paul Pickering, former dean of the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences, for having granted me the Honorary Lectureship in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (SLLL), which has provided me in retirement with the location and the facilities to carry out the necessary research. My thanks, too, to the SLLL for having hosted me during all this time. My warmest thanks also go to all the librarians at Chifley Library who have generously helped me, over these years, to access printed and digital materials relating to Italian cinema, in particular, Luciana Panei and Rebecca Barber, who have helped build up the library’s holdings in the area, and in the Interlibrary Loan/DSS section, Katy Najafi and all the wonderful team, but most especially Broderick Proeger, who often moved mountains to fulfill my unending, and at times arcane, interlibrary loan requests. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dona and Joe Di Giacomo for generously granting me access to the FDLC’s extensive video and DVD collection of Italian films. My very warmest thanks also go to my friend and colleague, Dr. Roger Hillman, for his unfailing support and encouragement, especially in times of difficulty; to Roberto Pettini for sharing so much of his inside knowledge of the ins and outs of the Italian film industry; and to Vittoria Pasquini for our many animated discussions, and sometimes contrasting evaluations, of recent Italian films and filmmakers. Votes of thanks, too, go to Jon Woronoff for his patience and invaluable advice, to April Snider for facilitating access to the photos, and to Andrew Yoder for his much-appreciated help with finalizing the manuscript. My most heartfelt thanks, as always, go to my son, Alessandro, for all his continuing encouragement and support.

xv

Reader’s Note

For the benefit of non-Italian readers, all Italian film titles are followed in parentheses by their English translation. Where the English title is an official one that already exists in general circulation, it is given in italics. A nonitalicized English title indicates that no previous English version of the title has been found and the translation offered is my own. No translation is given in cases where the Italian title is so well known that it is also used in English, as in La dolce vita or L’avventura, or in cases where the title involves an untranslatable play on words, as in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfan. What is regarded as the official date of a film can often vary according to the source consulted. The date provided here is the one that the majority of the most reliable sources furnish as the year of the film’s Italian release. By and large (although not always) the online Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has served as a dependable guide. In order to facilitate the rapid and efficient location of information and to make this book as useful a reference tool as possible, extensive cross-references have been provided in the dictionary section. Within individual entries, terms that have their own entries are in boldface type the first time they appear. Related terms that do not appear in the text are indicated in the See also. See refers to other entries that deal with the topic.

xvii

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AGIS

Associazione Generale Italiana dello Spettacolo / Italian General Association for Entertainment

ANAC

Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici / National Film Writers’ Association

ANEC

Associazione Nazionale Esercenti di Cinema / National Film Exhibitors’ Association

ANICA

Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini / National Association of Film and Affiliated Industries (While conserving the acronym, the association’s full name has recently been changed to Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali)

API

Autori e Produttori Italiani / Italian Filmmakers’ and Producers’ Association

APT

Associazione Produttori Televisivi / Television Producers’ Association

BAFTA

British Academy of Film and Television Arts

CDC

Cooperativa Doppiatori Cinematografici / Cooperative of Film Dubbers

CICAE

Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai / International Confederation of Art Cinemas

CSC

Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia / Experimental Center for Cinematography (National Film School)

EAGC

Ente Autonomo di Gestione per il Cinema / Independent Authority for Cinema Management

ENIC

Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Cinematografiche / National Film Industries Authority

FEDIC

Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub / Federation of Italian Cineclubs

FIPRESCI

Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique / Federazione Internazionale della Stampa Cinematografica / International Federation of Film Critics

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ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

LUCE

L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa / Union of Educational Cinematography

OCIC

Office Catholique International du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel / International Catholic Organization for Cinema and the Audio-Visual

ODI

Organizzazione Doppiatori Cinematografici / Organization of Film Dubbers

RAI

Radiotelevisione Italiana / Italian National Radio and Television

SAFFI

Società Anonima Fabbricazione Films Italiane /Italian Filmmaking Company Limited

SIAE

Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori / Italian Society of Authors and Publishers

SIGLA

Società Italiana Gustavo Lombardo Anonima / Italian Gustavo Lombardo Company Limited

SNCCI

Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani / National Union of Italian Film Critics

SNGCI

Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani / National Union of Screenwriters

UCI

Unione Cinematografica Italiana / Italian Cinematographic Union

Chronology

1895 11 October: In Florence, Filoteo Alberini applies for a patent for his Kinotografo Alberini, a device for “recording, projecting and printing moving images on film.” The patent is officially granted on 21 December, too late to scoop the Lumière brothers, who have already patented, and extensively exhibited, their own cinématographe during that year. 1896 13 March: A demonstration of the Lumière invention is held in Rome in the studio of photographer Henri Le Lieure. 29 March: Vittorio Calcina organizes the first Italian exhibition of the Lumière cinematograph in Milan. Screenings in other Italian cities follow. 20 November: Calcina films the first Italian newsreel: Umberto e Margherita di Savoia a passeggio per il parco (King Umberto and Margherita of Savoy Strolling in the Park). 1898 Italo Pacchioni begins making films in Italy with his own version of the Lumière cinematograph. Impersonator and quick-change artist Leopoldo Fregoli also adapts the Lumière invention to create his own “Fregoligraph,” which he uses to film himself in sequences that are then projected as part of his stage performances. The first permanent movie houses are opened in Rome and other Italian cities. Anna Gentile Vertua publishes Cinematografo: Commedia in 2 atti per fanciulle, arguably the first Italian literary work to deal expressly with the new medium. 1901 In Naples, Menotti Cattaneo opens the Sala Iride. Father Ferdinando Rodolfi (later bishop of Vicenza) publishes a long essay on the new art of moving pictures. 1904 Gustavo Lombardo sets up a film distribution company in Naples. In Rome, Alberini inaugurates the cinema Moderno. In Turin, Arturo Ambrosio sets up a workshop for the manufacture of film stock. 1905 In Rome, Alberini and Dante Santoni establish the first Italian film production company, Alberini & Santoni. Soon after Alberini produces and directs La presa di Roma (The Capture of Rome), widely acknowledged as the first Italian “feature” film. Permanent movie houses are now present in all the major Italian cities. In Naples, the Troncone brothers begin making films. In Venice, brothers Almerigo and Luigi Roatto also begin producing films, which they screen in their small chain of cinemas.

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CHRONOLOGY

1906 The Alberini & Santoni company is transformed into the Cines. In Turin, Arturo Ambrosio founds the Ambrosio Film company and, with the help of photographer Roberto Omegna, begins producing documentaries and fiction films. Also in Turin, Carlo Rossi founds the Carlo Rossi & C., which two years later will become Itala Film. 1907 The Cines opens a distribution office in New York. In Milan, Luca Comerio founds the Comerio production company, which soon merges with the Società Anonima Fabbricazione Films Italiane (SAFFI) to become the SAFFI-Comerio. The first Italian film magazines begin to be published as trade journals. Philosopher Giovanni Papini publishes one of the first theoretical articles on the cinema in the Turin daily La Stampa. 1908 Ambrosio Film scores its first international success with the historical superspectacle Gli ultimi giomi di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii), directed by Luigi Maggi. In Naples, Lombardo begins publication of the film magazine Lux. 1909 In Naples, Elvira and Nicola Notari found the Dora Film company. In Milan, the SAFFI-Comerio becomes Milano Films. In Turin, André Deed begins making his Cretinetti films for Itala. 1910 An estimated 500 permanent movie houses are now operating throughout the peninsula. Lombardo establishes the SIGLA film distribution company in Naples. 1911 Roberto Omegna wins first prize in the documentary film section of the Turin International Exhibition with his La vita delle farfalle (The Life of Butterflies). Milano Films release L’Inferno, acknowledged as the first Italian full-length feature film (70 minutes). In Paris, Ricciotto Canudo publishes his first essay on the cinema, styling it the “Sixth Art.” 1912 Films are now granted the legal protection of copyright. 1913 Enrico Guazzoni directs Quo vadis? for the Cines company. Giovanni Pastrone directs Cabiria, which, when released in 1914, achieves unprecedented box office success and international critical acclaim. Lyda Borelli, appearing in Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting) becomes the first diva, thus inaugurating the Italian star system. The first national film censorship regulations are introduced. 1914 Ninety full-length feature films are produced in Italy. The year 1914 also marks the highest point of Italian silent film penetration of the American market. Nino Martoglio’s Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark) is released, later to be canonized as an early milestone of cinematic realism.

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1915 Maciste (Marvelous Maciste) is released, the first of a long line of films produced by Itala and featuring the “good giant” who had first appeared in Cabiria. Francesca Bertini gives one of her most acclaimed performances in Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina. She becomes the highest-paid film actress in Europe. 1916 The Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, which hails cinema as the most modern of the arts, is published. Maciste alpino (The Warrior) is severely cut by the censors in order not to offend Austria, now Italy’s ally in World War I. 1917 Ambrosio Film produces Cenere (Ashes), Eleonora Duse’s only film, directed by Febo Mari. Despite Duse’s reputation as a stage diva, the film is only moderately successful. In Naples, Lombardo expands from distribution to production by creating Lombardo Film. 1918 Francesca Bertini creates her own film production company, Bertini Film. 1919 The consortium Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI; Italian Cinematographic Union) is formed, uniting most of the major production houses in Italy. In Turin, Enrico Fiori founds FERT (Fiori Enrico Roma Ticino), one of the few production companies that continue to operate independently of the UCI. 1920 Stefano Pittaluga establishes his film distribution company, Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga (SASP). Tighter film censorship regulations are introduced, to be enforced by a film censorship board. 1921 The UCI is in terminal crisis following the collapse of its major financial backer, the Banca di sconto. 1923 Fascist law confirming and strengthening previous regulations regarding film censorship. Most of the American majors open subsidiaries in Italy. 1924 L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE) is created. MGM begins shooting Ben-Hur at the Cines studios in Rome. Pittaluga expands from distribution to film production by buying up the FERT studios. 1925 LUCE is nationalized; it becomes the Istituto Nazionale LUCE, with exclusive responsibility for the production of all documentary and educational films in Italy. 1926 Law requiring all cinemas to screen a LUCE newsreel before any feature film is shown. Pittaluga buys all of the UCI’s exhibition and distribution networks. Alessandro Blasetti founds the cinema journal Lo schermo, soon renamed Cinematografo.

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CHRONOLOGY

1927 After a long crisis, the UCI is liquidated, and most of its assets are acquired by Stefano Pittaluga’s SASP. Law requiring first-run cinemas to devote 10 percent of annual screening time to Italian films is introduced. 1928 Gustavo Lombardo moves from Naples to Rome, where he founds the Titanus production company. Alessandro Blasetti produces and directs Sole (Sun), released the following year. The government creates the Ente Nazionale per la Cinematografia (ENAC; National Authority for Cinematography). 1929 Pittaluga takes over the Cines studios and equips them for sound. Mario Camerini directs Rotaie (Rails), subsequently also released in a sound version in 1931. 19 April: The first screening of The Jazz Singer occurs at the Supercinema in Rome. 1930 Sound films begin to be produced at the Rome Cines studios. The first Italian talkie released is Gennaro Righelli’s La canzone d’amore (The Song of Love), adapted from a short story by Luigi Pirandello. 1931 The first law providing state subsidies to Italian film producers is introduced. 5 April: Stefano Pittaluga suddenly and unexpectedly dies. The satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio is founded in Rome. 1932 The inclusion of film screenings at the Venice Biennale inaugurates the Venice International Film Festival. Emilio Cecchi is appointed artistic director of the Cines. Alessandro Blasetti opens the first film school in Italy under the auspices of the Conservatory of Saint Cecilia in Rome. The first dubbing studio opens in Rome. 1933 Law requiring all feature-length foreign films to be dubbed into Italian is introduced. Exhibitors are required to show at least one Italian film for every three non-Italian films screened during the year. Ivo Perilli’s Ragazzo (Boy) becomes the only film to be banned outright by the Fascist regime, prohibited by express order of Benito Mussolini himself. 1934 The Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia (General Directorate of Cinematography), a government department for the overall management of the Italian film industry, is formed under the direction of Luigi Freddi. The Ciano-Hays accord to regulate the importation of American films into Italy is signed. Giovacchino Forzano founds the Pisorno studios at Tirrenia. Renato Gualino sets up the LUX Film production company. 1935 The Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Cinematografiche (ENIC; National Film Industries Authority) is formed. A decree establishes a special fund to finance film production at the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. A national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, opens under the direction of Luigi Chiarini. 26 September: A mysterious fire destroys the Cines studios in Rome.

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1936 29 January: Work begins on the construction of Cinecittà. The journal Cinema is founded, soon to come under the direction of the Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini. 1937 28 April: In Rome, the Cinecittà studio complex is opened by Mussolini. The Centro Sperimentale begins publishing its journal Bianco e nero. Carmine Gallone directs Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal), the most expensive film produced under Fascism and financed largely by government funds. 1938 The Alfieri law establishes significant financial incentives for Italian films that do well at the box office. A decree granting ENIC a monopoly over the importation and distribution of all foreign films in Italy is enforced. In protest, the major American studios withdraw from Italy. 1939 A decree strengthening state censorship over all film production and exhibition is instituted. Francesco Pasinetti’s Storia del cinema is published. 1940 Vittorio De Sica directs his first film, Rose scarlatte (Red Roses). 1941 The Cines is resurrected a third time, with Luigi Freddi as head. After working with Francesco De Robertis on the fictional documentary Uomini sul fondo (Men on the Bottom), Roberto Rossellini directs his first film, La nave bianca (The White Ship). 1942 Law prohibiting Jews from working in any branch of the film industry is introduced. Blasetti directs Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds), Luchino Visconti directs Ossessione, and Vittorio De Sica directs I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us). All three films are later regarded as forerunners of Neorealism. 1943 Following the declaration of the armistice in September, the Cinecittà studios are dismantled and facilities are taken north by retreating Fascists with the intention of founding a Cinevillage in Venice. Much of the equipment ends up in Germany or is lost. 1944 The Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini (ANICA, National Association of Film and Affiliated Industries) is founded in Rome. Following the liberation of Rome, the studios of Cinecittà are used as a camp for displaced persons. 1945 Rossellini directs Roma città aperta (Rome Open City). The Associazione Generale Italiana dello Spettacolo (AGIS; Italian General Association for Entertainment) is founded. The abrogation of Fascist laws restricting importation of foreign films opens the way for a massive return of Hollywood films to Italy.

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CHRONOLOGY

1946 Rossellini directs Paisà (Paisan), the second of his war trilogy. The Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani (SNGCI, National Union of Screenwriters) establishes the annual Nastro d’argento (Silver Ribbon) prize. 1947 Cinecittà and the Centro Sperimentale reopen. The Central Office for Cinematography within the Prime Minister’s Department is created, headed by undersecretary Giulio Andreotti. A new law to regulate film subsidy and censorship is introduced. Andreotti censors Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth) for its “pessimism,” provoking a public letter of protest from Rossellini and 34 other directors. 1948 22 February: The manifesto of the Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano (Movement for the Defense of Italian Cinema) against state censorship of films is published. De Sica directs Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves). Giuseppe De Santis directs Riso amaro (Bitter Rice), released the following year. Despite the growing recovery, three-quarters of all new films screened in Italy are American. 1949 The first accord governing coproductions with France is signed. A copy of every Italian film produced from now on is to be lodged with the National Film Library at the Centro Sperimentale. De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. MGM begins shooting Quo vadis? in Rome. 1950 New (Andreotti) law governing film subsidy, censorship, and distribution is introduced. Producers Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis form a joint production company. Michelangelo Antonioni directs his first feature film, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair). Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope) suffers cuts due to censorship. 1951 ANICA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sign their first accord. A manifesto for the defense of Italian cinema is issued and signed by 18 leading directors and screenwriters. 1952 Andreotti publicly criticizes De Sica’s Umberto D. for presenting Italy to the world in a negative light. Federico Fellini directs his first solo film, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik). Steno and Mario Monicelli direct the first Italian film in color, Totò a colori (Totò in Color). 1953 Guido Aristarco and Renzo Renzi are tried and jailed for publishing the outline of a film script that allegedly defames the Italian armed forces. Monicelli’s Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina) is blocked by the censors and only released two years later after a host of cuts and changes. The longawaited inauguration of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Cinema Museum) occurs in Turin.

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1954 Fellini directs La strada, which two years later is awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. ANICA institutes a board of self-censorship. Ponti and De Laurentiis dissolve their joint production company. Television is introduced in Italy. 1955 ANICA and AGIS institute the annual David di Donatello prize. The year 1955 sees the highest point of cinema attendance in Italy (819 million). Cinemascope is used for the first time in Italy. 1956 Angelo Rizzoli founds Rizzoli Film. Cinema attendance begins to decline. 1957 ENIC is dissolved. 1958 Mario Monicelli makes I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), which inaugurates the commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian style). Law creating the Ente Autonomo di Gestione per il Cinema (EAGC, Independent Authority for Cinema Management) is introduced. Carlo Ponti moves to Hollywood. The Cines is definitively wound up. 1959 The Ministero del Turismo e Spettacolo (Ministry for Tourism and Spectacle) is created. Rossellini directs Vittorio De Sica in Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere), which receives an Oscar nomination. Mario Monicelli makes La grande guerra (The Great War). 1960 Fellini’s La dolce vita wins the Palme d’or at Cannes but in Italy provokes widespread scandal and protests. Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) is initially granted a release but is subsequently impounded by the censors. 1961 Pier Paolo Pasolini makes his directorial debut with Accattone. Vittorio De Seta makes Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo). Francesco Rosi directs Salvatore Giuliano. The first university course on the history of cinema is instituted at the University of Pisa and taught by Luigi Chiarini. Sophia Loren wins an Oscar for her performance in De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women). Germi directs Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style), which two years later is awarded the Oscar for Best Screenplay. 1962 New censorship regulations are proclaimed as part of a long-awaited new law on the cinema. De Laurentiis initiates construction of a rival studio complex to be called Dinocittà. Dino Risi makes Il sorpasso (The Good Life). 1963 Fellini releases Otto e mezzo (8½). Visconti directs Il gattopardo (The Leopard). A new agreement is signed between ANICA and the MPAA. 1964 The overwhelming box office success of Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) initiates the Spaghetti Western genre. Pasolini makes Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew),

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which receives three Oscar nominations. LUX Film withdraws from film production. The First Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema (International Exhibition of New Cinema) is held at Pesaro. 1965 New law (Legge Corona) regulating production and subsidy of films by the Italian state is introduced. Marco Bellocchio directs his first film, I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket). 1966 RAI TV moves into film production with Liliana Cavani’s Francesco d’Assisi (Francis of Assisi). ANICA and RAI reach an agreement regarding the screening of films on television. Italnoleggio is created to improve national production and international distribution of Italian films. The Golden Lion at Venice is awarded to Gillo Pontecorvo’s La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers). 1967 At Cannes, Antonioni wins the Palme d’or with Blowup. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani direct their first solo film, I sovversivi (The Subversives). 1968 Pasolini makes Teorema (Theorem). ANICA members withdraw from all state film boards as a protest against government policy. Demonstrations disrupt the Venice Festival, leading to the decision to discontinue the award of prizes for the next decade. 1969 Workers occupy the offices of the Instituto LUCE. The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia appoints Rossellini as its interim head. 1970 Dario Argento directs his first film, L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage). Marcello Mastroianni wins the Best Actor award at Cannes for his role in Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia— tutti i particolari in cronaca (The Pizza Triangle). 1971 Pasolini makes Il Decameron (The Decameron), the first of his Trilogy of Life. Elio Petri’s Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion) is awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. LUCE and Cinecittà are in grave financial debt. A new law to provide more credit for national film production is introduced. Italian films achieve the historic record of 65 percent of the home market. 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris) is granted a release by the censorship board but is immediately impounded by local authorities. De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Francesco Rosi’s Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair) receives the Palme d’or at Cannes. 1973 Anna Magnani dies.

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1974 Dino De Laurentiis moves to America. Fellini’s Amarcord wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema at Pesaro is dedicated to a reevaluation of Neorealism. Vittorio De Sica dies. 1975 1 November: Pasolini is murdered at Ostia, Rome. His last film, Salò, is confiscated by the censors, and its producer, Alberto Grimaldi, is given a two-month jail sentence. 1976 Bertolucci makes Novecento (1900). A tribunal orders all copies of Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango to be destroyed, and the director and producer receive a two-month jail sentence. 17 March: Luchino Visconti dies. 1977 Nanni Moretti makes Io sono un autarchico (I Am Self-Sufficient) in Super 8, which immediately achieves cult status. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre padrone receives the Palme d’or at Cannes. 3 June: Roberto Rossellini dies. Lina Wertmüller becomes the first female filmmaker to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for her Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties). The first red-light cinemas appear in Italy. 1978 Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs) is awarded the Palme d’or at Cannes. The year 1978 sees a marked decrease in cinema attendance in Italy. Italian films’ share of the home market falls to 42 percent while American films increase to 41.5 percent. The New York Museum of Modern Art hosts a retrospective of Italian films, titled Before Neorealism: Italian Cinema 1929–1944. 1980 A large retrospective of Italian postwar cinema is broadcast on the private TV network Canale 5. 1981 Massimo Troisi directs his first film, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three). 1982 Ermanno Olmi establishes Ipotesi Cinema, an independent film school at Bassano del Grappa. Le giornate del cinema muto (Pordenone Silent Film Festival) is inaugurated; it is soon to become the most internationally renowned silent-film festival in the world. The Tavianis’ La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) wins both the Grand Jury and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Cannes. 1983 Roberto Benigni directs himself in his first feature, Tu mi turbi (You Disturb Me). A fire at the Statuto cinema in Turin kills 64 people. 1984 Italnoleggio is wound up and its functions absorbed by the Istituto LUCE. Silvio Berlusconi’s Reteitalia TV network moves into film production.

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1985 Fewer than 90 films are produced in Italy; lowest level since 1950. Law instituting a new unitary fund (FUS) for the finance of film and other forms of live spectacle is introduced. 1987 Mario Cecchi Gori establishes the Cecchi Gori Group for film production. Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo found Sacher Film. Bertolucci’s L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) wins nine Oscars. 1 February: Alessandro Blasetti dies. 1988 The Odeon cinema in Milan opens as Italy’s first multiplex. Film attendance in Italy reaches the record low of 93 million. 1989 Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso) wins the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. 1990 Fellini directs what will be his last film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon). Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso) awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. 1991 Nanni Moretti opens the Nuovo Sacher, an independent cinema in Rome. Daniele Luchetti makes Il portaborse (The Yes Man), a film that uncannily anticipates the revelations of the so-called Mani pulite (Clean Hands) investigations a year later. Sophia Loren receives an Oscar for her career. 1992 Mario Martone makes his directorial film debut with Morte di un matematico napoletano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician). Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo is awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Gianni Amelio’s Ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) wins the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Despite prizes, the year has the lowest level of cinema attendance in Italian postwar history. 1993 31 October: Fellini dies. Italian films’ share of home market falls to a record low (14.5 percent). 1994 A new law to encourage production and provide credit for the film industry is introduced. Antonioni receives an Oscar for lifetime achievement. 1995 The year 1995 sees the lowest number of films produced in Italy in the postwar period (75). 1996 The Roberto Rossellini Institute is created to restore and preserve all of the director’s work. Giuseppe De Santis dies. Marcello Mastroianni dies. Vittorio Gassman receives the Golden Lion for his career. 1997 Cinema attendance increases to 120 million.

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1998 Cinecittà is privatized. Daniele Ciprí and Franco Maresco’s Totò che visse due volte (Toto Who Lived Twice) is refused a release by the censorship board on grounds of blasphemy but is subsequently absolved on appeal. Leftwing government moves to abolish film censorship altogether. 1999 Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) wins Oscars for Best Actor, Best Musical Score, and Best Foreign Film. Legislation is enacted officially transforming the Centro Sperimentale into the Scuola Nazionale del Cinema. Cinecittà is divided into Cinecittà Holding and Cinecittà Studios. 2000 The National Cinema Museum in Turin is reopened at the Mole Antonelliana. Italia Cinema is instituted to help promote and distribute Italian films abroad. 2001 Nanni Moretti wins the Palme d’or at Cannes with La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room). 2003 Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) wins the Un certain regard section at Cannes. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers is screened at the Pentagon as a study in how to combat terrorist insurgence. 2004 A comprehensive new law (Legge Urbani) on cinema and the internet is introduced. Direct state funding for films is decreased, but a system of tax shelters for investors is instituted and product placement in films is now permitted. Measures are legislated to counter audiovisual piracy. In Rome, the Casa del Cinema officially opens in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The Massimo Troisi Prize for best short comic film of the year is established. 2005 Alberto Lattuada dies. The first-ever comprehensive white paper on the state of the Italian film and audiovisual industry is commissioned and published by Cinecittà Holding. The Association of Italian Documentarists (DOC/IT) institutes an annual prize for best feature documentary. Fellini’s memory is honored with his image on the Italian five euro coin. The Tuscan independent filmmaking cooperative, I Licaoni, produces its first full-length film, Kiss Me Lorena, which they then make freely available online. 2006 Alida Valli dies. Cristina Comencini’s La bestia nel cuore (The Beast in the Heart) is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The New York Museum of Modern Art hosts a retrospective of the films of Paolo Virzì. 2007 Ennio Morricone is awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement. Michelangelo Antonioni dies. Luigi Comencini dies.

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2008 Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah) wins the Grand Prix at Cannes. Paolo Sorrentino’s ll divo receives the Jury Prize and an Oscar nomination. Dino Risi dies. 2009 Ermanno Olmi directs Terra madre, a paean to farmers all over the world and to the Slow Food movement. The Istituto Luce is merged with Cinecittà Holding to create the public stock company Cinecittà Luce. 2010 Dino De Laurentiis dies. Mario Monicelli dies. Multi-award-winning screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico dies. 2011 Vittorio De Seta dies. Cinecittà Luce is transformed into the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, a state company functioning as the cinema and audiovisual media arm of the Ministry for Culture and Tourism. 2012 The Taviani brothers’ Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) wins both the Golden Bear and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin. 2013 Damiano Damiani dies. Carlo Lizzani dies. Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary, Sacro GRA, wins the Golden Lion at Venice. Mariangela Melato dies. Moretti’s Sacher Film withdraws from distribution. Funded by crowdsourcing, Ferrania, the century-old manufacturer of film stock, resumes the production of 35 mm film, thus appearing to mark a hiatus in the overwhelming movement toward digital filmmaking. 2014 Genre director Sergio Sollima dies. Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Veteran actress Virna Lisi dies. 2015 Laura Antonelli dies. Francesco Rosi dies. 2016 Ettore Scola dies. New comprehensive (Franceschini) law governing all audiovisual media in Italy is introduced. Bud Spencer dies. Quo vado? (Where Am I Going?), a light comedy directed by Gennaro Nunziante and starring TV comedian Checco Zalone, becomes the highest-grossing Italian film of all time. The first two installments of Paolo Sorrentino’s TV series The Young Pope premiere as a special event at the Venice Festival. The Gian Maria Volonté Film School opens in Rome, offering free tuition to meritorious students. 2017 Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare is nominated for the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. 3 July: In the wake of the Franceschini Law, the Istituto Luce Cinecittà reacquires the Cinecittà studio complex, thus bringing the studios back into public hands. Immediate plans are developed for an extensive renovation of all the facilities and the construction of several new studios. Jasmine Trinca wins the Best Actress award at Cannes for Fortunata.

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2018 Veteran directors Ermanno Olmi and Vittorio Taviani die. Marcello Fonte wins Best Actor at Cannes for his role in Matteo Garrone’s Dogman. Alice Rohrwacher wins the Best Screenplay award at Cannes for Lazzaro felice. Carlo Vanzina dies. 2019 Franco Zeffirelli dies. Lina Wertmüller receives her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Board of Governors announces that she will also be presented with an Honorary Academy Award in 2020 for “her exceptional contributions to the state of motion pictures arts and sciences.” MultiOscar nominated costume designer, Piero Tosi, dies. Andrea Camilleri, author of the much-filmed Inspector Montalbano novels, dies. 2020 Veteran actress, Lucia Bosé, dies from COVID-19. Legendary film composer, Ennio Morricone dies, and is buried, according to his own wishes, in a small, private funeral. Veteran screen and stage actress, Franca Valeri, dies peacefully in her sleep several days after turning 100.

Introduction

Italian cinema is now justly regarded as one of the great cinemas of the world. Historically, however, its fortunes have varied. Following a brief moment of glory in the early silent era, Italian cinema appeared to descend almost into irrelevance in the early 1920s, as French and German cinemas flourished and screens in Italy came to be dominated largely by the advancing Hollywood machine. A strong revival of the industry, which gathered pace during the 1930s, was abruptly truncated by the advent of World War II. The end of the war, however, initiated a wholesale renewal as films such as Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), flagbearers of what soon came to be known as Neorealism, attracted unprecedented international acclaim and a reputation that only continued to grow in the following years as Italian films were feted worldwide. Ironically, they were celebrated nowhere more than in the United States, where Italian films consistently garnered the lion’s share of the Oscars, with Lina Wertmüller becoming the first woman to ever be nominated for the Best Director award. It was during this period, then, that Italian cinema achieved something of an apotheosis, with the names of directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini becoming international bywords for cinematic daring and innovation and the release of their next films being eagerly awaited everywhere. At the same time, in a wide variety of personal styles, other filmmakers extensively explored social and political themes, using the cinema to reflect Italy back on itself, while directors like Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, and Dino Risi also played with the genres and expanded the boundaries of popular cinema. Such glory could not last forever, of course, and by the mid-1970s, much of the vitality that had characterized postwar cinema had begun to wane. With remarkable resilience, however, and defying all rumors of its demise, Italian cinema revived in the early 1990s as a younger generation of filmmakers again embraced the cinema in order to explore both private concerns and public vices in a postmodern Italy. The revival has come to be consolidated in the new millennium. Thus, for more than a century, with all its waxing and waning fortunes, Italian cinema has retained its position as a key social and cultural institution. The real miracle has been that while drawing primarily on its own cultural and artistic heritage, and thus being in many ways so thoroughly Italian, it has also so frequently produced films whose cinematic artistry, humor, and deep human1

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ity have resonated well beyond their local context to appeal to audiences worldwide. Images such as Anna Magnani cut down by gunfire as she pursues the army truck in Rome Open City, or Anita Ekberg swanning her way through the Trevi fountain in La dolce vita have thus remained indelibly imprinted in the minds of spectators everywhere, as icons of cinematic art at its most moving and most exhilarating.

THE EARLY YEARS But for a simple twist of fate, the cinema itself might have been an Italian invention. Indeed, the historical record shows that in the same year in which the Lumière brothers patented their cinématographe in France, a young technical officer and inventor named Filoteo Alberini filed a patent for a very similar device “for the recording, printing and projecting of moving images,” in Florence. By the time Alberini’s patent was granted, however, the Lumière brothers had already begun holding public screenings using their device in Paris and were manufacturing it in commercial numbers in their factory at Lyon. Within only a few months, the Lumière cinématographe reached Italy, where it was first shown in Rome in March 1896 before screening in all the other major Italian cities. Given the immediate and overwhelming success of the Lumière invention, it hardly seems surprising that Alberini abandoned any idea of marketing his own kinetografo. Nevertheless, he clearly retained an interest in the new medium and, by 1901, had opened one of the first permanent movie houses in Florence. Three years later he moved to Rome and opened the cinema Moderno before joining in partnership with his friend, Dante Santoni, in establishing the first Italian company “for the manufacture of cinematographic materials.” While undoubtedly not the very first film ever to be shot in Italy, the first film produced by the Alberini & Santoni company (a year later transformed into the Cines) can nevertheless be regarded as marking the beginning of the Italian film industry. Directed by Alberini himself, La presa di Roma—20 settembre 1870 (The Capture of Rome—20 September 1870) was an imaginative if rather hagiographic re-creation of the culminating event of Italian political unification: the final battle in which the Piemontese army breached the walls of Rome and annexed the city (against the wishes of the pope) to the United Kingdom of Italy. Rather appropriately, then, Italian cinema came to be born in a filmic reenactment of the birth of the modern Italian nation itself. While the film’s choice of subject and its mode of production (filmed partly in a studio and partly in external locations, using both professional actors and hundreds of extras lent by the Italian army) already betrayed the

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propensity for grand historical reconstructions that would soon come to characterize Italian filmmaking, its national theme significantly also prefigured the role that the cinema would continue to play in establishing and reflecting notions of Italy and Italian identity. Projected on a giant screen at Porta Pia where the event had taken place exactly 45 years earlier, the film proved to be an enormous success and firmly established Alberini and his company at the forefront of film production in Italy. At the same time, other adventurous filmmakers were also beginning to appear throughout the peninsula. In Naples, the Troncone brothers had already graduated from screening to making films, and in Turin, Arturo Ambrosio, an enterprising photographer and optical equipment supplier, was also busy establishing his own Ambrosio Film company and equipping it with its own studios. Thus, by 1907 there were at least nine production companies operating in Italy, distributed throughout the peninsula in the major cities of Rome, Turin, Naples, and Milan. In that same year, the Cines opened the first of its many international subsidiaries in New York, where it proceeded to market its films under the rubric of “the matchless splendour of Italian Art.” A year later the enormous popularity in the United States of Ambrosio’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1908) effectively opened up the American market to Italian films. The industry in Italy continued to flourish with new companies being set up by the day. In 1909, the Film d’Arte Italiana, following the model of its parent, the French Pathé’s Film d’Art, began to employ well-known actors to make “quality” films of famous plays, beginning with a version of Shakespeare’s Othello. In the same year, the newly formed Milano Films company, whose management board included some of the most august members of the Milanese nobility, embarked on the production of a full-length feature film of Dante’s Inferno. Taking three years to complete, the 70-minute film was released in 1911 to tremendous acclaim both in Italy and abroad, where it was seen as establishing a new benchmark for the length and the artistic quality of feature films. By this time, Giovanni Pastrone, the enterprising head of the Itala company, had also succeeded in luring the foremost French film comic, André Deed, to come work for him in Turin. For the next few years, Deed continued to turn out hundreds of slapstick comedies at the Itala studios, all featuring the anarchic character of Cretinetti (Foolshead), who became so popular worldwide that Pastrone was able to sell his films sight unseen from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro. Especially in the early days most of the Italian studios produced a wide variety of films, including “actualities,” documentaries, comedies, historical costume dramas, and myriad adaptations of literary and theatrical works. The major studios, however, came to achieve their greatest commercial successes with a number of spectacular Graeco-Roman epics with which they established a strong presence in the international market and particularly in the

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United States. In the wake of the acclaim lavished on Ambrosio’s early version of The Last Days of Pompeii, Itala scored a huge hit in America with La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1910), and Cines achieved an even greater triumph with its Quo vadis? (1913), a blockbuster extravaganza directed by painter-turned-director Enrico Guazzoni, who now came to specialize in the genre. However, by far the most impressive and commercially successful of all these early sword-and-sandal epics was Pastrone’s Cabiria (made in 1913 but released in 1914), a film whose technical brilliance and extraordinary scope impressed no less than D. W. Griffith, who paid homage by imitating it with his own Intolerance (1916). During this period, the Italian studios also began to make a great deal of what came to be known as cinema in frac (cinema in white tie). Influenced by late decadent romanticism and the works, and more particularly the style, of Italian literary superstar Gabriele D’Annunzio, these were frenetically passionate melodramas set in elegant upper-class salons featuring the alluring femmes fatales of the Italian screen (the divas) in doomed and deadly love affairs. Beginning with Mario Caserini’s Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), the film that launched the career of the foremost diva of the period, Lyda Borelli, the genre continued to flourish for almost a decade, making the reputation of actresses such as Francesca Bertini and Pina Menichelli, who came to be venerated as screen goddesses throughout Europe. The years leading up to World War I thus marked the first golden age of Italian cinema when production boomed and Italian films were in great demand both at home and abroad. Surprisingly, Italy’s entry into the war in 1915 provoked only a momentary and minimal disruption to film production, which continued unabated during the war years. The end of the war, however, brought a rude shock to the industry as it confronted a radically changed situation. As the war had dragged on, foreign markets had all closed their doors; the American industry had organized itself into a more efficient and aggressive supplier of attractive product, and at home, the diva phenomenon had pushed production costs up to absurd and unsustainable levels. In 1919, in an attempt to remedy an ever-deteriorating situation, the major Italian film companies and their staff banded together under the leadership of the president of the Cines, Baron Fassini, to form the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI, Italian Cinematographic Union). High hopes were short lived, however, as poor management practices, internal conflicts between some of the major stakeholders, technical and artistic inertia, and finally the declared bankruptcy in 1921 of UCI’s principal financial backer, the Banca di sconto, inexorably led to the syndicate’s collapse, and with it the greater part of the Italian film industry itself. Thus in 1922, even as Benito Mussolini and his black-shirted followers were marching on Rome to install their new Fascist regime, the Italian film industry, which had known such glories only a

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decade earlier, appeared to be entering a phase of terminal decline. By the mid-1920s, when more Italians than ever were going to the cinema, the Italian industry had largely dissolved, with many of the leading actors and directors having either abandoned the industry or moved to France or Germany, where film production was still flourishing.

THE FASCIST PERIOD Given the cinema’s obvious potential for propaganda and Fascism’s nationalistic ideological profile, one might well have expected the Fascist regime to immediately initiate measures to attempt to salvage the national film industry as soon as it took power in 1922, even if only to bend the cinema to its own purposes. However, apart from confirming, and indeed strengthening, film censorship regulations in 1923, the regime showed little interest in feature film production during its first few years and did little to stem the flow of American films flooding into Italy in response to an ever-growing popularity of the cinema with Italian audiences. Where it showed a great deal of interest, however, was in newsreel and documentary filmmaking. In 1924, even as the American majors were setting up branches in Italy and MGM was preparing to shoot a version of Ben-Hur in Rome itself, the regime was offering strong encouragement for the proposed formation of L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (Union of Educational Cinematography), an organization set up to promote the use of film for scientific and educational purposes, and sponsored by the loosely constituted Syndicate of Cinematographic Instruction. The organization was essentially private but Mussolini showed his own personal support for it by providing the felicitous acronym under which it would come to be universally known, LUCE (Light). A year later the body was nationalized. Renamed the Istituto Nazionale LUCE, it came under the direct control of Mussolini himself and henceforth had the official function of recording and broadcasting the achievements of the regime through newsreels and documentaries. The crucial role that the government was reserving for this sort of filmmaking was confirmed by a decree in 1926 that obliged all cinemas (now likely to be showing foreign, and in all probability American, films) to screen a LUCE newsreel or documentary before every feature film. The major part of the handful of feature films still being made in Italy during this period, such as the strongman, or Maciste, films, were coming from the studios of Stefano Pittaluga. A veteran distributor and cinema manager who had wisely avoided joining the ill-fated UCI, Pittaluga had in fact prospered during the crisis, in large part by distributing and exhibiting foreign films. He had consequently been in a position to buy up most of what

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remained of the old production houses, including the historic Cines studios in Rome, and had thus, by the mid-1920s, actually become the industry. Indeed, being a distributor, a producer, and an exhibitor at the same time, Pittaluga was the closest Italy ever came to having an American-style film tycoon presiding over a vertically integrated studio. As also the president of the film producers’ association, Pittaluga began to lobby the government for stronger support for the industry, but as an astute operator, he also read the signs and began to equip both his cinemas and his studios for the coming of sound. At the same time, Alessandro Blasetti, a young film critic and passionate advocate for a revival of the national cinema, succeeded in setting up an independent production company, the Augustus. With it he produced his first feature film, Sole (Sun, 1928), a powerful epic rural drama set in the Roman Pontine marshes displaying the strong influence of the flourishing Russian cinema. Around the same time, another young director, Mario Camerini, having already impressed the authorities with his colonial epic Kif Tebbi (1928), also put together an independent production company to make Rotaie (Rails, 1929), a dark and brooding existential drama bearing all the stylistic markers of the German Kammerspiel film. In very different ways during the next decade, Blasetti and Camerini would come to be the two leading directors of Italian cinema under Fascism. With its officiating presence at the inauguration of Pittaluga’s revived Cines studios in May 1930, the Fascist government signaled its willingness to provide greater support for the national feature film industry. In October of that year, the Pittaluga-Cines studios released Italy’s first sound film, La canzone d’amore (The Song of Love, 1930), directed by a veteran of the early silent days, Gennaro Righelli, who had been enticed back to Italy after several years of working abroad. In June 1931, the government finally offered its first tangible support to the industry by enacting a law providing film producers with a rebate of 10 percent of a film’s box-office takings in the first year of its Italian release. As well as the financial incentive itself, the measure was meant to encourage the production of popular Italian films that could compete successfully at the box office with foreign imports. A more systematic regulation of the industry came in 1933 through a law that replaced the previous financial rebate with a series of cash prizes for films that could demonstrate a high level of artistic or technical excellence. The new law also attempted to address the issue of foreign competition by requiring all foreign films to be dubbed into Italian and by levying a tax on the dubbing that would be used to provide more funds for national production. The strongest support for the local industry, however, lay in the new legal requirement for exhibitors to screen at least one Italian film for every three imports. Such overt government support helped revive feature film production, especially at the Cines where, following Pittaluga’s untimely death in 1931, artistic directorship had been wisely passed into the hands of writer and

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literary scholar Emilio Cecchi. Under Cecchi’s enlightened leadership and strong encouragement, directors such as Blasetti and Camerini came to be joined by many others returning from self-imposed exile in other European countries in making both fiction films and quality documentaries. By the time Cecchi decided to retire from the Cines in late 1933 in order to pursue his literary interests, feature film production in Italy had doubled. This still proved hardly enough to undermine Hollywood’s dominance of Italian screens, which continued uninterrupted until the monopoly law of 1938, but it did go some way toward allowing exhibitors to fulfill their Italian screen quota. At the same time, a number of other measures were also contributing to a national revival. In 1932, a film festival was introduced as part of the already flourishing Venice Arts Biennale. Although initially intended as a biennial showcase of world cinema, the festival’s extraordinary and immediate success led to its becoming transformed, from its second edition, into an annual international filmmaking competition. In 1934, with the setting up of the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia (General Directorate of Cinematography) under the direction of Luigi Freddi, the regime effectively took control of all aspects of filmmaking in Italy, from the approval of financing from a special fund with the Banca di Lavoro to the final granting of a censorship release. Film treatments and screenplays were required to be submitted to the directorate for approval before work on any project was started, although few films were rejected outright since Freddi’s film policy proved to be relatively enlightened. Before being appointed to head the directorate, Freddi had visited both Hollywood and Nazi Germany and had written a report for the government in which he praised the former and severely criticized the latter for what he regarded as its counterproductive tactics of indoctrination. Within a year of taking up his post, Freddi also created the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a world-class national film school that would soon be training many of the actors and directors who would go on to play a major role in the cinema of the immediate postwar period. These same years also witnessed the spread of a network of progressive university cinema clubs (the cine-GUF), strongly supported by Freddi, and the birth of prestigious dedicated journals such as Bianco e nero, the official journal of the Centro Sperimentale, and Cinema, which would soon come under the direction of the Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini. After a mysterious but rather convenient fire destroyed the Cines studios one night in September 1935, Freddi proposed the building of a new and much larger cinema studio complex, to be financed by the government but administered, at least in the first instance, by the then acting head of the Cines, Carlo Roncoroni. Built in record time, the new complex, aptly named Cinecittà (Cinema City), was

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officially inaugurated by Mussolini himself on 28 April 1937 under a huge banner that proclaimed, “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” (Cinema is the strongest weapon). Despite the increased national production made possible by the new studios, American films nevertheless continued to dominate Italian screens, with foreign films generally accounting for 85 percent of the internal market at a time when cinema-going was attracting 70 percent of all money spent on leisure and entertainment. In 1938, the so-called Alfieri law significantly raised the government rebate on Italian feature films and, at the same time, established a virtual government monopoly over the importation and distribution of all foreign films. Affronted by a measure they feared would reduce their profits, the American majors withdrew from Italy altogether, leaving the field free to Italian producers. Predictably, the number of feature films made in Italy continued to increase, soon reaching the annual quota of 100, which had been set by the regime itself. Curiously enough, however, a decade of strong financial support and institutional control of the industry by the regime produced few openly Fascist films. Indeed, one of the most accomplished, Blasetti’s Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1935), a film that sought to provide some justification for the violence of the Fascist street gangs in the old days, was actually one of the very few films that Freddi ever attempted to censor, convinced as he was that it would be counterproductive at this point for the regime to have its previous history of street violence brought back into the limelight. The big-budget and highly rhetorical Scipione l’Africano (Scipio the African, 1937), financed almost completely from government coffers, also proved to be a complete flop, both critically and at the box office. In the wake of Mussolini’s Ethiopian campaign of 1935, a number of heroic war films were produced, such as Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (White Squadron, 1936) and Goffredo Alessandrini’s Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938), a film nominally supervised by Vittorio Mussolini on which the young Roberto Rossellini collaborated as a scriptwriter. Especially after the withdrawal of the American companies, there was also a prolific production of light comedies and sentimental melodramas that came to be known as the cinema dei telefoni bianchi, or white telephone films. Modeled in part on the Hollywood screwball comedy but often based on popular middle European, and in particular Hungarian, theater pieces, these films were largely escapist fare. After the war, however, they would consistently be accused of having been functional to the interests of the regime by distracting the Italian public from the harsh realities around them. The frivolity and artificiality of these films was especially decried at the time by writers connected with the journal Cinema. Although nominally edited by Vittorio Mussolini, the journal was relatively progressive and, ironically, became something of a haven for left-leaning critics and even

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clandestine members of the Italian Communist Party. From the pages of the journal, critics like Giuseppe De Santis called for a greater sense of realism in Italian films, and in 1942, the group around De Santis was given the opportunity of putting ideas into practice when they came together to work on Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). Visconti’s film, a transposition into an Italian setting of American pulp-novelist James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, would later be canonically cited as the direct forbearer of postwar Neorealism, but it is important to note that a call for greater realism in the cinema was rather widespread at the time and not, as would later be claimed, confined to left-wing or anti-Fascist circles. Despite all the difficulties that naturally arose with Italy’s entry into World War II, film production not only continued unabated but actually increased, reaching 120 films in 1942. Film production was continuing apace in 1943 when, in the wake of the armistice that Italy signed with the Allies, Cinecittà was closed and much of its equipment looted by the retreating Germans and die-hard Fascists. Freddi and a small number of others who had worked in the industry attempted to revive national film production in Venice under the aegis of the so-called Republic of Salò, but of the 20 or so films actually made, few were widely seen and even fewer survived.

NEOREALISM AND THE POSTWAR REVIVAL While particular aspects of Neorealism have continued to be debated to the present day, there has never been any real doubt that Neorealist films played the central role in the rebirth of Italian cinema in the immediate postwar period. Made almost as the smoke was still clearing from the rubble, films like Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) immediately won worldwide acclaim and brought Italian cinema an international reputation and prestige that it had not enjoyed since the early silent days. At the same time, it is important to note that Neorealist films were always more appreciated abroad than in Italy itself, where, with only a small number of notable exceptions, they failed to attract anything like the same amount of viewer interest. Furthermore, in Italy, as a result of the annulment in 1945 of all Fascist legislation regarding cinema imports, Neorealist films found themselves forced to compete against literally hundreds of films that the American studios had not been able to distribute in Italy since 1938 and which they now dumped, almost with a vengeance, on what had always been their most lucrative overseas market. At the same time, after a first flush of enthusiasm for the rawness and honesty with which Neorealist films presented the harsh reality around them, Italian audiences soon turned away from Neorealism and toward the less committed

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but more entertaining fare offered by the commercial cinema. It is instructive to note that the highest-grossing film in Italy in 1946 was not Rossellini’s Neorealist classic Paisà (Paisan, 1946), which only rated sixth in that year’s box office, nor De Sica’s Sciuscià, which, with an honorary Oscar to its credit, did not even earn enough to make it into the top 10, but rather Riccardo Freda’s remake of a 1925 Rudolph Valentino adventure fantasy Aquila nera (Return of the Black Eagle), starring male heartthrob Rossano Brazzi. Moreover, once the center-right Christian Democrat Party had installed itself in power and created the Central Office for Cinematography, which in many ways reprised all the powers and functions of the Direzione Generale of the Fascist period, Neorealist filmmakers also found themselves having to contend with a certain hostility from government authorities regarding the image of a poor and downtrodden Italy that their films were allegedly presenting to the world. Given all these pressures, it is not surprising that many Neorealist directors soon reverted to the more traditional elements of cinematic spectacle and genre in order to produce more palatable, and bankable, films. Alongside this “rosy” or “pink” Neorealism, as it came to be called, the traditional genres themselves made a strong comeback. Comedy, a great staple of Italian cinema from its earliest days, returned massively in the films of Erminio Macario and the great Totò, whose legion of films would stretch out to the early 1960s and end up constituting something of a genre of their own. In 1949, Raffaele Matarazzo revived the classic form of the sentimental melodrama with Catene (Chains), the first of what became a long series of enormously popular old-style heart-tuggers featuring the regular couple of Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari. With the Cold War intensifying in the early 1950s, the petty squabbles in a provincial town between an incorrigible parish priest and the town’s hard-line Communist mayor became the big attraction of the Don Camillo films, with the first in the series, II piccolo mondo di Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo), topping the box office in 1952 and its immediate sequel, II ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953) earning almost as much in the following year. In the same year, Luigi Comencini scored his first big success with the highest-grossing film of that year, the “pink Neorealist” Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), quickly followed the next year by its equally popular sequel, Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy). Thus, thanks perhaps even more to the genres than to Neorealism, by the early 1950s the Italian film industry had not only returned to health but was positively thriving. By 1954, the year in which Federico Fellini released his Oscar-winning La strada, Italy was producing more than 200 films a year. At the same time, despite the continuing dominance of Hollywood, the Italian share of the home market had grown from 13 percent in 1946 to 36 percent in 1954. During the same period, cinema attendance had also doubled, reaching

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a peak of 820 million in 1955 at a time when audiences worldwide had already drastically declined; in America, in fact, they had already diminished by almost half. The overflowing health of Italian cinema in the 1950s came to be embodied in the maggiorate, buxom starlets like Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren who were soon conquering not only Italian screens but also Hollywood itself. At the same time, making a virtue of currency regulations that severely limited the amount of funds they were allowed to repatriate from their films in Italy, some of the American majors began to produce their biggest-budget films in Rome, thus creating the Hollywood on the Tiber so brilliantly, if caustically, depicted in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). Ironically, while the aim of the American studios was to exploit the fact that production costs were lower in Italy than at home, the net result for the Italian industry was a leg up in terms of increased function and productive capacity. Soon, with films such as Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1958) and Le legioni di Cleopatra (Legions of the Nile, 1959), enterprising Italian directors were making homegrown but highly marketable versions of the big-budget historical blockbusters that Hollywood had come to make in Rome, but making them at a fraction of the price. Then, in 1958, the remarkable critical and commercial success of Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) marked the birth of what would become the most prolific and commercially viable genre of the next two decades, the commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian style).

TRIUMPH AND DECLINE: THE 1960S After its steady revival during the previous decade, Italian cinema achieved what was a virtual apotheosis in the 1960s. 1960 was a key year for a number of national cinemas, but in Italy, it proved to be the annus mirabilis. Released that year, Fellini’s La dolce vita, Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers), and De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women) all received overwhelming international acclaim, but even more tellingly, as a sign of a new level of film culture in Italy itself, they were also the three highest-grossing films on the home market. The year also bristled with the impressive debuts of many new directors like Ermanno Olmi, Florestano Vancini, and Damiano Damiani, who would soon rise to the front ranks. They were joined less than a year later by others also destined to make their mark, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Giuliano Montaldo, and Vittorio De Seta. With some justification, this enormous flowering of filmmaking talent would later be characterized as an Italian New Wave, except that in Italy the sheer number of new directors who either emerged or reached their artistic

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maturity during the next 15 years was so huge as to suggest a tide rather than a mere wave. The roll call of emerging directors included many who would soon go on to achieve an international reputation, such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Sergio Leone, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, as well as a host of others, such as Marco Ferreri, Ettore Scola, and Tinto Brass, whose no-less-considerable reputations would be more confined to the European sphere. This enormous recruitment to the film industry was strongly supported by a number of major production companies, chief among them Goffredo Lombardo’s Titanus, which had set down solid foundations during the revival of the 1950s and was thus in a position to underwrite much of the growth. But the increase was also due to the arrival of adventurous new producers like Alfredo Bini, Alberto Grimaldi, and Gaetano G. De Negri, all of whom believed strongly enough in the young directors to take chances in financially supporting their artistic experimentation. One factor that undoubtedly contributed to the richness and depth of the film culture of this period was that the young auteurs who continued to emerge throughout the decade—by contrast, for example, with the French New Wave—appeared able to carry out their innovative experiments in film form and language without needing to explicitly reject their cinematic fathers. It thus became a time when several generations of filmmakers worked side by side, with established directors like Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni producing some of their most assured and mature work while alongside them young directors like Marco Bellocchio and Bernado Betrolucci were busily making their angry and iconoclastic debuts. It is important to note, however, that the huge increase in recruitment and production during this period occurred not only at the level of “quality” or art house cinema but also, and indeed more significantly, in the realm of the popular genres. The peplum, or sword-and-sandal film, which had already begun to flourish in the latter part of the 1950s, reached its peak in the early 1960s with more than 30 released in 1961 alone. The horror genre, which had also witnessed a number of tentative attempts in the previous decade, began invading the screens in 1960, with Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday) only the first of five horror films released that year, and those only the first of hundreds that would proliferate throughout the decade. Even as Fellini and De Sica were collecting their Oscars for art films like Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963) and Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), Sergio Leone, under the pseudonym Bob Robertson, was giving birth to the Spaghetti Western, a genre that would dominate both Italian and international screens for the next decade. Most significant of all, however, was the flowering of the commedia all’italiana, a sort of supergenre that, in all its prolific manifestations, managed for many years to continually blur distinctions between high art and popular commercial cinema.

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If the creative energies of individual directors and producers were undoubtedly a determining factor in all this growth, the real basis of the commercial viability of Italian cinema during this period was the extensive network of second- and third-run cinemas that had grown up throughout the peninsula in the early 1950s and that allowed films to continue generating a return for several years after their first release. Genre films, the staple of this network, were also able to benefit from generous government subsidies for coproductions with other European countries. From 1965 onward, through the provisions of Article 28 of the so-called Corona law, the government also provided a significant contribution to films being financed or cofinanced by the personnel concerned. All of these factors contributed to helping the industry both develop its export potential and claw back a major share of the home market from foreign (American) imports. Thus by the mid-1960s, thanks in part to the continuing international popularity of the genres, for the first time since the early silent days Italy had become a net exporter of films. In 1971, as Petri’s truculent Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion) brought home yet another Oscar, the industry had achieved the almost unthinkable, with Italian films supplying 65 percent of the home market. The triumph, however, was relatively short lived. By the mid-1970s, through an aggressive policy of blockbuster production and saturation booking, the so-called new Hollywood had begun to reimpose its dominance over Italian screens. At the same time, the death of veteran directors like Visconti, De Sica, Rossellini, and Pasolini inevitably depleted the production ranks. As costs escalated, fewer films were made, with annual film production falling by almost one-third in five years. In an effort to maintain profits, exhibitors continued to increase admission prices. A combination of demographic changes in audience makeup and a lowering of attendance provoked by higher ticket prices resulted in the progressive closure of the second- and thirdrun cinema circuits. Then, beginning in 1975, cinema-going, which had been declining only gradually for two decades, began to plummet. Thus, by the end of the 1970s, Italian cinema was, once again, in crisis.

CINEMA AND TELEVISION In the following years, television would often be apportioned the lion’s share of blame for what appeared to many at the time to be cinema’s terminal decline. As already suggested, the factors involved were undoubtedly many but the allegation regarding television’s responsibility for reducing cinema attendance was, at least partially, justified. With the introduction of American-style commercial television, following the total liberalization of

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broadcasting in 1976, the small screen became attractive enough to keep audiences away from the cinemas in droves. At the same time, the absence for a number of years of any legal regulatory framework allowed the newly established commercial and private networks to screen any number of films, however acquired and whenever they chose. As a result, commercial television not only drastically emptied the cinemas but effectively took over the role previously played by the second- and third-run theaters, thus putting further pressure on even the few that remained. However, the relations between the cinema and the public television broadcaster, RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), had always been more complex and less mutually antagonistic than was commonly portrayed. In the early 1960s, the RAI had regularly produced its own fiction programs, and its screening of a very limited number of commercial feature films had continued to be strictly regulated by both state legislation and agreements with the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini (ANICA), the filmmakers’ union. In the late 1960s, a more progressive administration that had been installed at RAI initiated a policy of inviting both established and emerging directors to make films destined eventually for the small screen but which could first be shown in theatrical release. Very few directors declined such an attractive offer, which provided them with opportunities to make films they might not otherwise have been able to produce. Among the first, and far from negligible, results of this policy were Fellini’s I clowns (The Clowns, 1970), Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970), and Luigi Comencini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1972), made in both a longer five-hour multi-episode version for television and as a standard-length feature for theatrical release. In 1977, the RAI’s policy bore even more significant fruit when the Taviani brothers’ Padre padrone became the first film produced by and for television to be awarded the Palme d’or at Cannes, a feat repeated a year later when the Golden Palm was awarded to Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs). As more than 250 million Italians deserted the cinemas in the next five years and conditions for filmmakers inexorably worsened, the RAI continued to hold out a lifeline to many directors, financing or cofinancing a host of films for many of the established auteurs, among them Francesco Rosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1980), Carlo Lizzani’s Fontamara (1980), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1981), and the Taviani brothers’ Kaos (Chaos, 1984). In 1982, RAI producer Paolo Valmarana also joined with directors Ermanno Olmi and Mario Brenta in setting up Ipotesi Cinema, an independent cooperative film school. Thus even as the crisis in the film industry continued to deepen in the early 1980s and as many talked openly of the death of Italian cinema, the relationship between cinema and television had already radically

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changed from rivalry and hostility to substantial interaction and collaboration. Indeed by the mid-1980s, it had become clear that only by cultivating this new relation could Italian cinema ensure its own survival.

REVIVAL AND RENEWAL IN THE 1990S In 1989, following almost a decade during which it had become ever more common to talk about Italian cinema in the past tense, the award of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and, a year later, the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, to Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) seemed to many to signal not only a revival of the cinema in Italy but also the return of Italian cinema to the world stage. Two years later, that return appeared to be amply confirmed when the Oscar for Best Foreign Film was awarded to Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991) and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and the European Film Award to Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). By the time Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1998) also collected the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and three Oscars, including the awards for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film, it was clear that reports of the death of Italian cinema had indeed been exaggerated and that a new generation of filmmakers had been active in Italy for some time. This renewed flowering of cinematic talent was soon dubbed the New Italian Cinema but continued to fit uneasily within generic characterizations. Indeed the most distinctive trait of this new cinematic production turned out to be precisely its extreme heterogeneity. Furthermore, although it became common, especially in the early years, to also refer to it as the “young” Italian cinema, quite a number of those who would soon be regarded as its most representative figures, directors such as Amelio and Nanni Moretti were really not so young and, in fact, had been making films since the 1970s. It was, nevertheless, true that the greater part of the directors (but also screenwriters and actors) who made their debut during this period were of a younger generation. Some came from the cabaret or the dramatic theater; some came from the national or other film schools; and many had worked, to a greater or lesser extent, in television and advertising. Yet while all displayed a high level of professional competence and a deep devotion to cinema as a form of artistic expression, none subscribed to any particular aesthetic program nor shared any artistic creed beyond that of wanting to make films. Many of the films of this new cinema did show a tendency to focus on the personal, often confining themselves to exploring domestic spaces and private concerns. The family, personal relationships, adolescence, and coming

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of age reappeared often as themes. The road movie began to appear frequently as a form. But alongside this focus on the private there was also an attempt to observe and reflect on the Italy that had emerged from what many called the “stupid years” of the 1980s, with some films of directors like Amelio, Marco Risi, Ricky Tognazzi, and Antonio Capuano demonstrating such a level of social commitment and critique that critics were prompted to talk about a “Neo-Neorealism.” Emblematic of this cinema’s reengagement with the social and the political was Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1990), whose uncanny perspicacity emerged clearly when the so-called Mani pulite investigations confirmed the real extent of the systemic political and social corruption that the film had sought to portray half in jest. Other films tackled even more difficult issues such as the legacy of the political terrorism of the 1970s, the continuing power of the Mafia, and the problems associated with the new immigration. One noticeable commonality of this new cinema was an abandonment of Rome as a primary geographical setting and a readiness on the part of these younger directors to locate their stories in different parts of the peninsula: Carlo Mazzacurati in the Italian northeast, Paolo Virzì and Benigni in Tuscany, Mario Martone and Capuano in Naples, and Tornatore returning often to film his native Sicily. At the same time, if this new cinema appeared to have no canonical center, it did have one major point of reference in Nanni Moretti. A maverick and iconoclastic filmmaker who had abruptly emerged in the 1970s, Moretti became, in the 1990s, not only a major on-screen presence through his own films and his appearance in the films of others but also, through his fierce independence and his production company, Sacher, a mentor and a model for many younger directors making their debuts.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM Despite widespread fears and expectations of a natural downturn after the revival of the 1990s, Italian cinema continued to flourish in the new millennium. Alongside the films of now established New Italian Cinema directors, such as Moretti’s La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001), which won the International Film Critics’ Prize and the Palme d’or at Cannes in 2002, and Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), whose six-hour length did not prevent it from being one of the most watched Italian films outside Italy in many years, there continued to be the impressive debuts of younger directors such as Vincenzo Marra, Daniele Gaglianone, Saverio Costanzo, and Daniele Vicari. Paolo Sorrentino attracted much attention, both in Italy and abroad, with three of his first four films, Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004), L’amico di famiglia

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(The Family Friend, 2006), and Il divo (2008), all being nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. In the event, Il divo won not only the Cannes Jury Prize but also received an Oscar nomination. Sorrentino was flanked by Matteo Garrone who, after a number of documentaries and the impressive three-episode Terra di mezzo (Land in Between, 1996) in the later 1990s, really emerged in the first decade of the new millennium with his strange but compelling L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002) and Primo amore (First Love, 2004), followed by the film that lifted him into the ranks of the star directors, Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008). Indeed Gomorra appeared to be such a groundbreaking achievement, not only in its presentation of the Neapolitan underworld but also in terms of its new and dynamic style of filmmaking, that a number of critics were led to divide the Italian cinema of the new millennium into a before and after Gomorra. The new millennium also witnessed a very strong resurgence of interest in documentary filmmaking. This was marked not only by an enormous increase in production but also by the timely formation of a national association of Italian documentarists (Doc/It) and the institution of numerous eagerly awaited annual documentary film festivals such as RomaDocFest, not to mention a higher visibility for the documentary form within the Venice Festival itself. At the same time, the short film also came into its own. Losing the stigma of being a mere preparatory exercise for feature filmmaking, the short film also came to be feted by the institution of a number of major short film festivals and the official recognition of the annual award of a host of designated prizes.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM: INTO THE FUTURE Much of the creative energy of the early years of the new millennium continued to animate the Italian cinema of the millennium's second decade. Indeed, in terms of creativity, this proved to be a period of solid consolidation during which the now-veterans of the New Italian Cinema, even as they were obliged to note the inevitable passing of the last members of the historic 1960s generation, were able to produce some of their most mature work. Alongside Daniele Lucchetti, Paolo Virzì, Gabriele Salvatores, Mario Martone, and Nanni Moretti, now all mainstays of the industry, Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino continued to fulfill the promise they had shown in their earlier years, with Sorrentino bringing Italy nothing less than the Oscar with his internationally acclaimed La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), a film that many were led to compare favorably with Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). Fellow Oscar winner, Giuseppe Tornatore, after the paean to his native Sicily in Baarìa (2009), was able to address the international market

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directly with his The Best Offer (2013) and Correspondence (2016), his first two English-language films. After a second successful period of working in Hollywood, Gabriele Muccino returned to Italy to bring together a who’s who of leading Italian actors in his sparkling ensemble comedy, A casa tutti bene (There’s No Place Like Home, 2018). At the same time, the period saw the impressive debut of younger directors, such as Pietro Marcello, Alice Rohrwacher, and Gabriele Mainetti who, with his first feature, Mi chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg, 2015), was able to garner praise from the American trade journal, Variety, for having successfully provided Italy with its very own superhero. Furthermore, while the gender gap could hardly be declared closed, a positive sign in that direction came during this period in the number of renowned actresses, such as Stefania Sandrelli, Laura Morante, and Valeria Golino, confidently taking up the opportunity to move behind the camera to write and direct their own films, with Golino in particular also frequently shouldering the mantle of producer on behalf of her own Buena Onda production company. The most surprising development during this decade, however, was undoubtedly the emergence of the so-called Checco Zalone phenomenon. In 2009, with already something of a cult following from his stage and television appearances, musician and comic performer Luca Medici, having adopted the playful stage-name, Checco Zalone, wrote and starred in his first film, Cado dalle nubi (Falling from the Clouds), a light and politically incorrect comedy about a young southern Italian would-be musician trying to make it big in the northern city of Milan. Directed by Zalone’s friend and fellow comic performer, Gennaro Nunziante, who was here making his own directorial debut, the film unexpectedly proved to be a solid box-office success. Two years later, the duo teamed up again in making Che bella giornata (What a Beautiful Day, 2011), another similarly irreverent comedy, which, however, actually topped the Italian box-office for the year, earning what would have previously been an unthinkable 43 million euro and, in the event, outdoing even international big-budget blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Pirates of the Caribbean. Two years later, with almost the regularity of a cinepanettone at Christmas, the third Checco Zalone film, Sole a catinelle (Sunshine by the Bucketload, 2013) topped both the year's box office and its own previous commercial success by earning more than 52 million euro. Then, three years later, with all of the lineaments of the Checco Zalone character indelibly established and on show, Quo vado? (Where Am I Going? , 2016), achieved the impossible; outdoing all three previous films, it earned more than 65 million euro, thus becoming the highest-grossing Italian film of all time. As the decade drew to a close, the overwhelming question became whether Lucini/Checco Zalone could possibly reach higher. The answer seemed to come in 2019, when, dissolving the partnership with Nunziante, Lucini directed himself competently enough in

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the long-awaited fifth Checco Zalone film, Tolo tolo (Alone, 2020). Released at the beginning of January 2020, the film managed to earn 46 million euro in a two-month release before the coronavirus pandemic closed the cinemas. One can now only wait to see if the Checco Zalone phenomenon may not succeed in being even stronger than a full-blown pandemic. Another notable development during this period was the taking root in Italy of long-form television, complicating the ever-present and never-quiteresolved question of the relation between the two media. Arguably the longform television series had already arrived on Italian pay-television in 2008 with the first season of Sky’s Quo Vadis, Baby?, soon followed by Romanzo criminale - La serie, similarly produced by Sky Italia and directed by young up-and-coming director, Stefano Sollima. Given the overwhelming success of the Romanzo criminale series (2008–2010), in 2013, Sky partnered with Italian production companies Fandango and Cattleya to produce the 12-part Gomorra - La serie. The first season (May–June 2014), directed by Sollima, with some episodes also directed by Francesca Comencini and Claudio Cuppellini, was so spectacularly successful and, arguably, so cinematic, that following its airing on the small screen, the entire season was also given a four-week theatrical release in 200 selected cinemas. Unsurprisingly, the series was able to go through to a second (May–June 2016), third (November–December 2017), and fourth (March–May 2019) season, each attracting a bigger audience than the previous, making a fifth season, scheduled to air in late 2021, inevitable. Significantly, the series continued to manifest an interest in interacting with the big screen rather than supplanting it. Thus, the first two episodes of the third season of Gomorra were screened in 300 cinemas on the weekend before the series was to begin airing, netting the production more than 500,000 euro at the box office and, moreover, considerably increasing the audience for its subsequent television launch. At the same time, in 2016, American HBO partnered with Sky Atlantic and Canal + to produce the 10-episode The Young Pope, written and directed by no less than Paolo Sorrentino. A blockbuster production budgeted at 40 million dollars and written and directed by an Oscar-winning director, the series was eagerly awaited and, for the first time in history, the first two episodes were premiered, out of competition, at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, netting Sorrentino the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella award. More significantly, following the broadcast of the entire series, and in an unprecedented breach of tradition, The Young Pope was also awarded a Special Nastro d'argento as Film of the Year. In 2019, two episodes of the nine-part continuation of the series, again written and directed by Sorrentino but cannily re-titled The New Pope, were similarly premiered at the Venice Festival, where they brought cinematographer Luca Bigazzi the Campari Passion for the Cinema award.

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Such a progressive blurring of the boundaries between the big and the small screen has inevitably generated a certain unease in the more traditionalist quarters of the Italian film industry, who see it as one explanation for an alarming but continuing erosion of cinema attendance. And yet, while financed by the big international broadcasters with deep pockets, it is major Italian production companies, such as Cattleya, Fandango, and Wildside, who are creating the content of these series, employing Italian directors, crews, and facilities, and thus, it could be argued, increasing and sustaining, rather than undermining, Italian film production. But the question cannot but remain open as the industry continues to grapple with other systemic problems. A particularly Italian anomaly with respect to cinema in other countries has continued to be the tendency of many cinemas to be closed over the summer period when film-going in Italy effectively comes to a halt. Moreover, as recently pointed out by the president of the Federation of Art Cinemas, two-thirds of the 200 or so Italian films made each year continue to be distributed in less than 10 copies, thus making them practically invisible for the majority of Italian filmgoers, except at festivals or retrospectives. At the same time, the rise of the Internet and its facilitation of piracy and the illegal downloading of films remains another challenge that has confronted the industry for more than a decade and to which it has yet to find a solution. In something of a concerted response to these and other problems, in November 2016 the Italian government passed a new and comprehensive law (the “Franceschini law,” named after the then-minister for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, who ushered it through Parliament), aimed at reorganizing and re-regulating the entire film and audiovisual sector in Italy. Creating a new 11-member National Council, to be drawn largely from stakeholders and representatives of the industry to oversee its implementation and functioning, the law provided for the establishment of a designated fund of 400 million euro for the financing of film and audiovisual production, itself to be automatically funded from a percentage of the taxes already being levied on companies and services across the sector, thus making it self-sustaining and no longer subject to the vagaries of changing governments. As well as streamlining previous cumbersome funding application processes in order to more effectively support the projects of directors and producers with a proven track record, the law also apportioned 15 percent of its finances to fund the first or second films of new directors, as well as supporting other initiatives and events promoting Italian cinema, such as festivals and retrospectives. In addition to increasing the number, and enlarging the scope, of tax credits to incentivize private investment in film production and distribution, the law also made provision for an additional 120 million euro to fund the renovation of old or heritage movie theaters and the opening of new venues. Importantly, the law also gave notice to all television operators, including the national broadcaster, RAI, but also private television networks and interna-

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tional providers, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Sky, of a mandated quota, with an increase being gradually brought in over a number of years, of European, and, in particular, Italian, film and fiction programs to be shown in prime time. It also mandated an increase in the minimum percentage of investment required from each television provider in European and Italian film production. Although it will inevitably take some time for all the provisions of the Franceschini law to be fully implemented—and the television providers have already successfully lobbied for a postponement of some of the requirements—a very positive outcome of the law and its reorganization of the sector was the possibility in July 2017 of the newly formed Istituto Luce Cinecittà to reacquire the Cinecittà studio complex and all its related assets, and thus bring an important part of Italy’s cinematic heritage, and its productive capacities, back into public hands. Two years later, again facilitated by the new law, the launch of “Moviement,” a coordinated stratagem to bring audiences back to the cinema in the summer months, supported by all the players in the industry, proved successful in filling the cinemas and making the summer season the highest-grossing period of 2019. Nevertheless, whatever other developments may have been in store in the wake of the new law, the Coronavirus epidemic has abruptly put everything on hold and the future, for Italian cinema as for much else, has become more uncertain than it has perhaps ever been. Yet, for those of us who love Italian cinema and would still nurture hopes for its future, perhaps a ray of light has recently been provided by the courage of Alberto Barbera in holding the Venice Festival in spite of everything. No Italian film gained either of the Lions, nor the Grand Jury Prize, but (one hopes) there is always hope for next year.

A ABATANTUONO, DIEGO (1955–). Actor. A standout member of a new generation of young actors who began to emerge in Italy in the late 1970s, Abatantuono came to films and television after having been immersed from an early age in Milanese cabaret culture. He came to prominence particularly with his personification of a voluble wild-haired young lout (a so-called terrunciello or country boy) with a belligerent attitude and an almost incomprehensible way of speaking that jumbled together different regional dialects. The character’s success onstage soon led to minor parts in Renato Pozzetto’s Saxofone (1978), Renzo Arbore’s Il pap’occhio (The Pope’s Eye, 1980), and Neri Parenti’s Fantozzi contro tutti (Fantozzi against the Wind, 1980). After also gaining a reputation on television, his comic verve really came into its own when he starred in a number of made-to-measure so-called demented comedies directed by Carlo Vanzina, beginning with I fichissimi (The Cool Ones, 1981) and followed by Eccezzziunale . . . veramente (Truly Exceptional, 1982), Viuuulentemente mia (Violently Mine, 1982), and Il ras del quartiere (Boss of the Neighbourhood, 1983). At the height of this early success, however, Abatantuono decided to abandon the screen in order to work for a time in the theater, where he received much praise for, among other things, his interpretation of Sganarelle in a production of Molière’s Don Giovanni. He returned to the cinema in 1986 in a more dramatic role in Pupi Avati’s Regalo di Natale (Christmas Present, 1986), a strong performance that earned him the Nastro d’argento for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He nevertheless returned to comedy and scored some of his greatest successes with the boisterous parts he played in a handful of films directed by Gabriele Salvatores, in particular Marrakech Express (1989), Turné (1990), and the Oscar-winning Mediterraneo (1991), which brought him his second Best Actor nomination for the David di Donatello. With an obvious propensity for comedy, he also subsequently managed to shine in more demanding dramatic roles, as in Carlo Mazzacurati’s Il toro (The Bull, 1994), Ettore Scola’s Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, 2001), Salvatores’s Io non ho paura, (I’m Not Scared, 2003), and in Avati’s Christmas sequel, La rivincita di Natale (Christmas Rematch, 2004). For most of the new millennium, 23

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however, having become something of the revered elder of Italian screen comedy, he has continued to appear in mostly comic films ranging from Vanzina’s bitingly satirical spoof, 2061: Un anno eccezionale (2061: An Exceptional Year, 2007) to the more recent, and admittedly genre-crossing, black comic thriller, Un nemico che ti vuole bene (My Beloved Enemy, 2018). ACCORSI, STEFANO (1971–). Actor. One of the most charismatic of the actors who emerged in the New Italian Cinema of the 1990s, Accorsi landed a supporting role in Pupi Avati’s Fratelli e sorelle (Brothers and Sisters, 1991) soon after graduating from high school. He then moved to Bologna and joined the Teatro Stabile dell’Arena del Sole. While working in the theater, he came to national prominence through a television advertisement for a well-known brand of ice cream, directed by the young Daniele Luchetti. His reputation was enhanced by a subsequent appearance in Enza Negroni’s popular generational film Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo (Jack Frusciante Left the Band, 1995). After more work on the stage, Accorsi returned to the cinema in a very moving interpretation of a young Resistance fighter’s coming of age in Luchetti’s Piccoli maestri (Little Teachers, 1998). This was followed by the lead role in Luciano Ligabue’s Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow, 1998), which earned him a David di Donatello and the Premio Amidei. Following his appearance in the enormously popular television miniseries Come quando fuori piove (Hens, Ducks, Chicken and Swine, 2000), directed by Mario Monicelli, he played the young homosexual lover in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life, 2001), a demanding role that was recognized with a Nastro d’argento. A year later he was awarded the Volpi Cup at Venice for his interpretation of the troubled visionary poet Dino Campana in Michele Placido’s Un viaggio chiamato amore (A Journey Called Love, 2002). After a two-year break, he returned to the big screen in Carlo Mazzacurati’s sentimental love story L’amore ritrovato (An Italian Romance, 2004) and then as the tough Police Commissioner Scialoja in Placido’s hardhitting crime drama Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005). In subsequent years, he has continued to play the handsome male lead in both French and Italian romantic comedies and family dramas such as Iliana Lolic’s Je ne dis pas non (Can’t Say No, 2009) and Gabriele Muccino’s Baciami ancora (Kiss Me Again, 2010) but has also often embraced more challenging and less glamorous roles, as in the drug-addicted former race car driver of Matteo Rovere’s Veloce come il vento (Italian Race, 2016), a extraordinary performance that rightly garnered him another Nastro d’argento, a David di Donatello, and an Italian Golden Globe for Best Actor. While also frequently appearing on the small screen—as Judge Esposito in Pietro Valsecchi’s eight-part series Il clan dei camorristi (Camorra Connection, January–February 2013) and as the fictional Italian prime minister in two epi-

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sodes of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope (2016)—he graduated to coproducing, as well as appearing in, 1992 (2016), a 10-part television series set in the heady days of the Clean Hands Investigation, which in that fateful year initiated what would become a meltdown of the clientelistic political system that had ruled Italy for most of the postwar period. A lavish production financed by Sky Atlantic, the series was so successful, both in Italy and throughout Europe, that Accorsi and his team of screenwriters immediately created an eight-part sequel, 1993 (2017). A concluding third series titled 1994 appeared in 2019. At the same time, his part as the Italian prime minister is reported to have been greatly extended in Sorrentino’s upcoming series, The New Pope, also scheduled for late 2019. AGE E SCARPELLI. See INCROCCI, AGENORE (1919–2005); SCARPELLI, FURIO (1919–2010). AGOSTI, SILVANO (1938–). Novelist, poet, film editor, cinematographer, screenwriter, and director. A passionately idiosyncratic filmmaker who, in a career spanning almost 60 years, has tenaciously and successfully struggled to remain completely independent in all aspects of his life and work, Agosti was educated at home by his parents at their country house outside Brescia until the age of 11. After several years of hitchhiking through Europe and the Middle East to gain experience of the world, he returned to Italy in 1960 and was admitted to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Having graduated from the Center with a prize-winning short film, La veglia (The Vigil, 1962), he was granted a scholarship that allowed him to carry out postgraduate study in film editing at the Moscow Film Institute. Returning to Italy, he collaborated with close friend and former fellow student at the Centro, Marco Bellocchio, in writing and editing (although under the pseudonym of Aurelio Mangiarotti), Bellocchio’s groundbreaking first feature, I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket, 1965). Two years later, he made his own directorial debut with Il giardino delle delizie (Garden of Delights, 1967). Although the film received much praise outside Italy—Ingmar Bergman personally complimented Agosti on the film and it was selected, by a jury that included Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, John Ford, and Dusan Makeveyev, as one of the 10 best films of the year, to be screened at the Montreal World Expo of 1967— in Italy it was vehemently attacked by the authorities for its patent critique of bourgeois morality and the Catholic religion, and subjected to some 29 minutes of cuts in order to gain its theatrical release. Strongly supportive of the 1968 student-worker movement, Agosti documented its outbreak in the Cinegiornale n.1 del Movimento studentesco (Cine-Journal No. 1 of the Student Movement, 1968) before making his second feature, N.P. il segreto (NP, 1971), a dystopic film set in the near

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future when work has been eliminated by the introduction of all-purpose machines with human beings paying the price by being secretly but ineluctably disappeared. After several other political documentaries, including a tribute to the resistance movement against the dictatorship of the Greek Colonels in Altri seguiranno (Others Will Follow, 1973) and an investigation of responsibility for the terrorist bomb in Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia in La strage di Brescia (The Brescia Massacre, 1974), Agosti again joined Bellocchio, this time also aided by screenwriters, Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, in making Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1975), a film aiming to denounce the oppressive conditions and inhumane practices in Italian psychiatric hospitals by allowing the patients to recount their experience in their own words. The film effectively contributed to the growing calls for change in the treatment of psychiatric patients that eventually resulted in the passing of the historic Basaglia Law in 1978. Three years later the same foursome came together to make a five-part documentary for national television, La macchina del cinema (The Cinema Machine, 1978), an iconoclastic look at the practice of filmmaking. It was while filming La macchina that Agosti met Franco Piavoli, then still a novice making short documentaries; he not only encouraged Piavoli to make features but also provided him with the 35 mm camera and moviola with which Piavoli was able to create his masterful Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet, 1982), which Agosti also produced. Discovering the difficulties in getting such a brilliant film shown in Italy prompted Agosti to also move into exhibition by buying and thereafter managing a cinema in the Roman district of Prati, which he named “Azzuro Scipioni” and in which, for the next 40 years, he has been able to screen what he personally considers the best that silent and art cinema can offer. At the same time, he returned to filmmaking with D’amore si vive (One Lives by Love, 1984), an engrossing nine-hour documentary series made for television consisting of long revealing interviews on the subject of sex and love elicited over several years from a host of socially marginalized inhabitants of the city of Parma. Having by this time also founded the “11 Marzo Cinematografica,” a cooperative production company with which he would produce all his subsequent films, most often with himself as the one-man crew, he then made Quartiere (District, 1987), an anthology of unconnected fictional stories about the vicissitudes of love, which was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at Venice that year. Four years later, adapted from his own novel of the same name, Uova di garofano (Sweet War, Farewell, 1991) carried out a poetic revisitation of the places and experiences of the war years of his childhood. L’uomo proiettile (1995), similarly adapted from his own eponymous novel, shortlisted for the prestigious Premio Strega, used a circus setting to engage with an idea dear to Agosti—namely, that human beings should only need to work three hours a day, devoting the rest to the creative pursuits of love and life. Five years later, La seconda ombra (The Second

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Shadow, 2000) returned in fictional guise to the concerns of Fit to Be Untied. The story, which ends with the new director of a psychiatric institution encouraging the cloistered inmates to tear down the stone wall separating them from the community outside, is a transparent tribute to Franco Basaglia, the radical anti-psychiatrist whose ideas eventually brought about the opening of the asylums in Italy. In the new millennium, Agosti has somewhat withdrawn from active filmmaking while continuing to publish dozens of successful novels and collections of poetry, and managing the Azzurro Scipioni cinema, where he also runs sessions on cinema for schoolchildren. He has more recently made a timely return to the cinema with several documentaries: Il fascino dell’impossibile (The Fascination of the Impossible, 2015), an inspired tribute to the lifetime of work with seriously mentally disabled children carried out, almost unnoticed, by Luigi Orazio Ferlauto in the Sicilian town of Troina, and Ora e sempre riprendiamoci la vita (Now and Forever Let Us Take Back Life, 2018) a documentary made for the national broadcaster, RAI, memorializing the decade following the events of 1968 in Italy when hopes for a transition toward a more humane and just society appeared almost realizable. Ever idiosyncratic, Agosti has, since 2009, also been petitioning UNESCO to formally declare the human being as part of the patrimony of humanity. In 2019, he was awarded a Special Nastro D’argento for his entire career. He continues to maintain his own website at https://www.silva noagosti.com. ALBANESE, ANTONIO (1964–). Actor, director, and writer. Born in Lombardy of Sicilian parents, Albanese was attracted to acting from an early age but was obliged to work in a factory for several years before being able to enroll in the Paolo Rossi Drama School of Milan in 1990. While studying acting at the school, he moonlighted doing cabaret, making his debut at the Zelig Theatre, where he began to create a repertoire of zany comic characters. He was soon performing his characters and comic routines on television, appearing on the Maurizio Costanzo Show and becoming a regular on the popular variety shows Su la testa and Mai dire Gol. At the same time, already displaying the versatility that would mark his career, he also began taking on dramatic roles in films. After a small part in Silvio Soldini’s Un’anima divisa in due (A Soul Divided in Two, 1993), he was chosen for a major role in Carlo Mazzacurati’s Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast, 1996), providing an impressive performance that earned him his first Nastro d’argento nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In the same year, he moved behind the camera to direct himself in a film version of a comic stage show he had been touring for several years, Uomo d’acqua dolce (Freshwater Man, 1997).

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He subsequently continued to alternate between stage, film, and television. In 1998, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani gave him the starring role in the first episode of their two-part Tu ridi (You Laugh). In 1999, he directed himself again in La fame e la sete (Hunger and Thirst, 1999), playing three physically identical but otherwise very different brothers to great comic effect. A year later Mazzacurati called him back to play one of the two likeable rogues in La lingua del santo (Holy Tongue, 2000). After directing himself again in Il nostro matrimonio è in crisi (Our Wedding Is in Trouble, 2002), he gave one of his most nuanced performances in Pupi Avati’s La seconda notte di nozze (The Second Wedding Night, 2005), bringing him Best Actor nominations for both the David and the Silver Ribbon. His next appearance, as the psychologically damaged husband attempting to cope with having been abruptly rendered unemployed in Soldini’s Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds, 2007), similarly earned him nominations for both prizes. He continued to create and exhibit a menagerie of new comic characters onstage and on television before returning to the big screen as one of two men whose hospitalization for a heart attack evolves into a warm friendship in Francesca Archibugi’s bittersweet comedy Questione di cuore (A Matter of Heart, 2009). Despite having often explicitly disavowed any intent toward political satire in the quirky characters he continued to create, he had during this period given life to the immeasurably sly, clearly corrupt, and hilariously grammatically challenged Southern politician Cetto La Qualunque, and in 2011 he brought him to the big screen in two films directed by Giulio Manfredonia, Qualunquemente (Whatsoeverly, 2011) and Tutto tutto niente niente (Everything and Nothing, 2012), both critically underappreciated but achieving quite extraordinary box office success. A year later he gave one of his best-ever dramatic performances in Gianni Amelio’s L’intrepido (A Lonely Hero, 2013), which was recognized with the prestigious Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Film Festival that year. Turning back to bittersweet comedy, his role as a staid middle-class father learning to confront his previously unacknowledged prejudices when his teenage daughter falls for a boy on the other side of the tracks in Come un gatto in tangenziale (Like a Cat on the Highway, 2017), finally brought him the Nastro d’argento for Best Actor in a Comic Film. More recently he again moved back behind the camera to direct himself in Contromano (Back Home, 2018), something of a road movie engaging the fraught issue of immigration with an effectively light touch, as well as writing, directing, and acting in a six-part series for national television, I topi (The Rats), a hilarious take on the domestic vicissitudes of a crime family, a comic rendition of a theme treated so seriously in the continuing seasons of Gomorra—la serie.

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Over the years, as well as onstage and on-screen, he has also given voice to some of his zany characters on the page. His most recent publication has been Lenticchie alla julienne: Vita, ricette e show cooking dello chef Alain Tonné—forse il più grande (Lentils à la julienne: Life, Recipes and Show Cooking of Chef Alain Tonné—Perhaps the Greatest, 2017). ALBERINI, FILOTEO (1865–1937). Widely acknowledged as the founding father of Italian cinema, Alberini patented an apparatus for shooting, printing, and projecting film in Italy in late 1895, only a month before the Lumière brothers began screening films in Paris using the cinématographe, which they had patented earlier that year. Although the Kinetografo Alberini was never built, Alberini maintained his interest in the new medium and, by 1904, had opened a number of permanent movie houses in Florence and Rome. Early in 1905, together with his friend Dante Santoni, he established the first Italian company “for the manufacture of films” and subsequently directed what is generally regarded as the first Italian (short) feature film, La presa di Roma 20 settembre 1870 (The Capture of Rome, 20 September 1870). The film employed experienced stage actors and was made with the collaboration of the army, which supplied the soldiers and the cannons. First screened outdoors at Porta Pia where the crucial breach of the city walls had taken place and on the anniversary of the final event in the political unification of Italy, it demonstrated Alberini’s talents not only as director but also as producer and entrepreneur. A year later the Alberini & Santoni company was transformed into the Cines. The company would continue, even if through a number of crises and interruptions, to be one of the pillars of the Italian film industry from the silent era into the 1950s, although Alberini himself would soon lose effective control of the company to others. In the following years, Alberini continued to experiment with cinematography, patenting a number of technical innovations, including a panoramic device and a pocket-size movie camera. His last patent, filed in 1935, two years before his death, was for a stereoscopic camera. ALDO, G. R. (1902–1953). Cinematographer. G. R. Aldo, born Aldo Graziati, moved to France in his late teens and briefly tried stage acting before working for many years as a still photographer in the French film studios. In the early 1940s, he graduated to camera operator on a number of films directed by Christian-Jaque. Returning to Italy in 1947 for on location shooting of Christian-Jaque’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1948), he met Luchino Visconti, who engaged him as director of photography for La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). He subsequently served as cinematographer on a number of Vittorio De Sica’s films,

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including Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), Umberto D. (1952), and Stazione termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953), and photographed Augusto Genina’s Cielo sulla palude (Heaven over the Marshes, 1949). He also worked with Orson Welles on The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952). Tragically, still at the peak of his career, Aldo was killed in a car crash during the filming of Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954), which was eventually completed by fellow cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. ALESSANDRINI, GOFFREDO (1904–1978). Director. Born in Cairo to Italian parents, Alessandrini abandoned an engineering degree at Cambridge University in order to pursue his passion for the cinema. In between working as assistant to Alessandro Blasetti on Sole (Sun, 1928) and Terra madre (Earth Mother, 1932), he produced an impressive documentary on the making of the Nag Hamadi Dam (La diga di Maghmod, 1929). His first fictional feature, La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary, 1931), the Italian version of a light comedy that had already been filmed in German, French, and English, proved extremely popular and established his professional reputation. After several years in Hollywood as a consultant for bilingual versions at MGM, Alessandrini returned to Italy to direct Seconda B (1934), another light, sentimental comedy set in a girls’ college (the title refers to a high school class), scripted by Umberto Barbaro. A biography of the Silesian saint Don Bosco was followed by Cavalleria (Cavalry, 1936), a historical melodrama much admired for its period recreation and for Amedeo Nazzari’s portrayal of the self-sacrificing cavalry officer. Romantic military heroism returned as the theme of Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938), a film nominally supervised by Vittorio Mussolini but on which the young Roberto Rossellini also worked as scriptwriter. Abuna Messias (Cardinal Messias, 1939) and Giarabub (1941) were both epic stories set in Africa; the latter recounted the heroic resistance of Italian troops besieged by the English at the oasis of Giarabub, which suggested to some that Alessandrini was supporting the colonialist aspirations of the Fascist regime. However, his next film, Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942), adapted from a novel by Ayn Rand, although ostensibly directed against the Russian Communist system, appeared to denounce the corruption at the heart of all totalitarianism. After the war, Alessandrini’s alleged closeness to the Fascist regime counted against him, and he worked mostly abroad. The most impressive of the few films he directed in Italy was Camicie Rosse (Redshirts, also known as Anita Garibaldi, 1952), a film about the Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi and his partner Anita, played by a fiery Anna Magnani. For a

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number of reasons, including ill health but also tension between the director and Magnani, who were in the middle of a marriage breakup at the time, the film was eventually completed by the young Francesco Rosi. ALLASIO, MARISA (1936–). Actress. With her slightly mischievous upturned nose and her pretty girl-next-door looks, Alassio seemed destined to become one of the major starlets of the Italian screen in the mid-1950s. She played small parts in Mario Camerini’s Gli eroi della domenica (Sunday Heroes, 1952) and Mario Costa’s Perdonami (Forgive Me, 1953) before her curvaceous figure and modest acting talents were showcased in Luigi Capuano’s Maruzzella (Mermaid of Naples, 1956). She then appeared in her most famous role, as Giovanna, in Dino Risi’s box office hit, Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1957), which was quickly followed by its equally successful sequel, Belle ma povere (Pretty but Poor, 1957). With her popularity at its peak, she played similar roles in Mauro Bolognini’s Marisa la civetta (Marisa, 1957) and Steno’s Susanna tutta panna (Susanna All Whipped Cream, 1957) before starring with legendary Italian American tenor Mario Lanza in Arrivederci Roma (Seven Hills of Rome, 1957). A year later, however, she met and soon after married Count Pier Francesco Calvi di Bergolo, a nobleman related to the House of Savoy, and retired from the cinema, never to return. Her last appearance on the screen was opposite Nino Manfredi in Risi’s romantic comedy Venezia, la luna e tu (Venice, the Moon and You, 1958). AMATO, GIUSEPPE (1889–1964). Actor, director, and producer. After having worked for many years in various capacities in the burgeoning Neapolitan film industry, Amato emigrated to America, where, for a time, he tried unsuccessfully to become a Hollywood film producer. Returning to Italy in 1932, he produced Cinque a zero (Five to Nil, 1932), a film directed by Mario Bonnard that employed the talents of veteran Sicilian stage actor Angelo Musco. This was followed by a string of popular comedies, among them Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932) and Il cappello a tre punte (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1935), two of the first films to star brothers Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo. In the following years, Peppino, as he was universally known, produced many of Mario Camerini’s films, among them Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1939), I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939), and Una romantica avventura (A Romantic Adventure, 1942), as well as Alessandro Blasetti’s La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1940) and the proto-Neorealist Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942).

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In the postwar period, he distinguished himself further as producer of several of the great classics of Neorealism, including Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Umberto D. (1952). He was also associate producer (usually uncredited) for Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and for Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950). His final, and perhaps greatest, triumph as a producer was Federico Fellini’s landmark La dolce vita (1960). Remembered affectionately as one of the Italian film industry’s most colorful characters, Amato also directed a handful of films himself, among them Yvonne la nuit (Yvonne of the Night, 1949) and Donne proibite (Angels of Darkness, 1954). AMBROSIO, ARTURO (1882–1960). Filmmaker and producer. One of the founding fathers of the Italian film industry, Ambrosio was a photographer who owned an optical equipment and photographic supply shop in Turin in the early years of the 20th century. In 1904, he returned from Paris with a French camera and, together with fellow photographers and film enthusiasts Roberto Omegna and Giovanni Vitrotti, began experimenting with the new medium in documenting current events. Two years later, buoyed by the success of these short documentaries and with the foresight of an astute entrepreneur, he founded the Ambrosio Film company, providing it with its own well-equipped studios and facilities. The company quickly grew, continuing to make actualities and documentaries under the supervision of Omegna, but also soon expanded into fiction films of a wide variety of genres. In 1908, its production of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii) gave birth to the grand epic spectacles that would distinguish Italian cinema for the next five years. A good businessman and an able manager, Ambrosio steered the company through a long series of award-winning films and innovative strategies throughout the 1910s, successfully penetrating the American market and setting up partnerships with German and Russian film companies. However, in the crisis that gripped the Italian film industry in the period immediately following World War I, Ambrosio sold his stock in the company to a Milanese industrialist, Armando Zanotto, and joined the ill-fated consortium Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union), for which he produced a number of films in the early 1920s. Following the spectacular critical and financial failure of the big-budget Quo vadis? (1925), Ambrosio retired from the industry, returning only briefly to head production at Scalera Film from 1939 to 1943.

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AMBROSIO FILM. Production company. Founded in Turin by Arturo Ambrosio in 1906 (originally Film Ambrosio e C., then transformed into a public stock company and renamed in 1907), Ambrosio Film quickly grew into one of the major production houses of the early Italian cinema, contributing significantly to making Turin the capital of the Italian film industry during this early period. By the end of its first year of operation, the company could boast a catalog of 80 films, including a short feature by Giovanni Vitrotti, Il cane riconoscente (The Grateful Dog), which was awarded the first prize for a feature film by the Lumière brothers. In addition to other award-winning documentaries and actualities, mostly shot by Vitrotti and Roberto Omegna, the company produced comedies—its resident comic Marcel Fabre made more than 150 films featuring the character of Robinet— and also initiated what would become the great success of the epic superspectacle with its 1908 production of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii). Ambrosio Film became particularly renowned for its quality literary adaptations, releasing, among many others, seven films based on the works of the then-reigning literary superstar, Gabriele D’Annunzio, in just two years (1911–1912), followed by an internationally acclaimed adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1913). In 1913, the company also opened the Cinema Ambrosio in Turin, one of the first luxury picture palaces in Italy. As well as maintaining a major presence on the Italian scene, Ambrosio coproduced films with German and Russian companies and was one of the few Italian companies to export into the American market, opening an affiliate in New York in 1912. After a glorious decade of successful production, however, the company began to falter in the general crisis that engulfed the Italian film industry in the period immediately after World War I. Having reduced its production to only a few modestly successful films in the early 1920s, the company was liquidated in 1924. AMELIO, GIANNI (1945–). Director and screenwriter. Having migrated to Rome from a small village in Calabria in 1965, Amelio began his career in cinema as assistant director to Vittorio De Seta on Un uomo a metà (Half a Man, 1966). He served a further apprenticeship as assistant director to, among others, Gianni Puccini, Lina Wertmüller, and Liliana Cavani, while also making a number of short films and ads for television. Having joined the national broadcaster, RAI, in 1970, he directed his first television feature, La fine del gioco (The End of the Game, 1970). His next major work, also made for television and financed by the RAI, was La città del sole (The City of the Sun, 1973), a meditation on the social utopia imagined by the 16th-century philosopher, Tommaso Campanella, in his book of the same name. Amelio next produced and directed Bertolucci secondo il cinema (The Cinema according to Bertolucci, 1976), a documentary that followed Ber-

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nardo Bertolucci as he filmed his ill-fated epic Novecento (1900, 1976), before directing La morte al lavoro (Death at Work, 1978), a telefilm imbued with cinephilia that took its title from Jean Cocteau’s remark, “Cinema is Death working on the actor.” Il piccolo Archimede (The Little Archimedes, 1979), the adaptation of a short story by Aldous Huxley about a child musical prodigy, is regarded as the most accomplished of these early films made largely with television audiences in mind. Amelio’s first work made specifically for the big screen came three years later with Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1982), a film that tackled the theme of the political terrorism that had afflicted Italy in the 1970s through the exploration of a troubled father-son relationship. Although the film brought Amelio the recognition of a Nastro d’argento for Best Story, he returned to making shorts for several years before directing I ragazzi di via Panisperna (The Boys from Via Panisperna, 1988). Adapted from a work by Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, I ragazzi was originally made as a threehour television miniseries and suffered somewhat when it was cut by an hour for its theatrical release. However, Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990), adapted from another work by Sciascia and exploring the moral quandaries of capital punishment, won Amelio the Nastro d’argento, the David di Donatello, and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. It was followed two years later by what is still widely regarded as his best film and, for many, the finest Italian film of the 1990s, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). A moving but unsentimental portrayal of the tenuous emotional relationship that develops between a young carabiniere and the two children whom he has been charged to escort from Milan to an orphanage in Sicily, Ladro brought Amelio much international acclaim, including a nomination for the Palme d’or and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and, in Italy, two Silver Ribbons and another David di Donatello. This stunning achievement was followed by the equally impressive Lamerica (1994), a powerful and complex film set in the context of the downfall of the Communist regime in Albania, inherently juxtaposing what America had meant for Italian migrants in the 1950s with what Italy had come to mean for destitute Albanians in the 1990s. Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998), the story of two Sicilian brothers who migrate to Turin with tragic consequences in the late 1950s, was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice and compared favorably, in spirit if not quite in scope, with Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). Returning to one of his favorite themes, the exploration of the father-son relationship, Amelio then made Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House, 2004), although, unusually for Amelio, the father’s encounter with his handicapped child in this film is played out in Germany rather than Italy. This willingness to move outside Italy while retaining a

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commitment to a cinema of social conscience was confirmed by Amelio’s next film, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star, 2006), adapted from a novel by Ermanno Rea but filmed almost entirely in China.

Gianni Amelio on the set of Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). Courtesy of Photofest.

After several years away from the big screen, Il primo uomo (The First Man, 2011), a French–Italian coproduction and the adaptation of a semiautobiographical novel by Algerian French existentialist writer Albert Camus, saw Amelio return once again to the theme of the absent father. L’intrepido (Intrepido: A Lonely Hero, 2013), a gentle satire of the world of work and social relations in contemporary Italy, was critically lauded as Chaplinesque and nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. Returning to the documentary form and reshaping a mountain of historical and archival material, Amelio then produced Felice chi è diverso (Happy to Be Different, 2014), a wide-ranging panorama on gay artists and writers in 20th-century Italy and a very public outing of himself as a gay filmmaker. His most recent film, Tenerezza (Tenderness, 2017), an unflinching dissection of fractured family relations and generational conflict set in an almost unrecognizable Naples, has earned him Silver Ribbons for both Best Film and Best Director. Concurrently he received the prestigious Bresson Prize for career achievement.

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In between making films, teaching at the Centro Sperimentale, and directing the Turin Film Festival, Amelio has also published a semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, Politeama (2016). AMENDOLA, FERRUCCIO (1930–2001). Actor and dubber. Widely regarded as one of the finest male dubbers in Italy in the postwar period, Amendola began his career in pictures by playing supporting roles in films such as Roberto Bianchi Montero’s La zia d’America va a sciare (The American Aunt Goes Skiing, 1957) and Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959) before becoming the regular Italian voice of American superstars Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone, Peter Falk, and Bill Cosby, among others. Amendola’s voicing of Robert De Niro in the Italian versions of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) were highly praised, and there was something of a scandal when he was not chosen to dub De Niro again in 1996 in the Italian version of Scorsese’s Casino (the part was done by veteran stage and television actor Gigi Proietti). Amendola also acted in substantial roles in films for television such as Storia d’amore e di amicizia (Story of Love and Friendship, 1982), directed by Franco Rossi, and in a number of very popular television miniseries, among them Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1982), Little Roma (Little Rome, 1988), and Pronto soccorso (Medical Emergency, 1990 and 1992). AMIDEI, SERGIO (1904–1981). Screenwriter. Although probably best remembered for his collaboration on Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), Amidei was a prolific and versatile screenwriter who scripted more than 100 films in a long and varied career. As a student in the 1920s, Amidei began acting as an extra at the Fert studios in Turin, his first role being as one of the many devils in Guido Brignone’s Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926). He subsequently served as assistant to Brignone on some of the other Maciste films and worked in a variety of other capacities at the Fert studios before moving to France where he was, among other things, assistant to Russian director Alexis Granowski on Les aventures du roi Pausole (The Adventures of King Pausole, 1933) and Les nuits moscovites (Moscow Nights, 1934). After returning to Rome in 1936, he took up screenwriting in earnest, ranging across a wide variety of genres, from Aldo Vergano’s historical drama Pietro Micca (1938) to Carlo Campogalliani’s playful comedy La notte delle beffe (The Night of Tricks, 1940). He even scripted Camillo Mastrocinque’s L’ultimo ballo (The Last Ball, 1941), usually regarded as one of the white

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telephone films. However, it would be his encounter with Rossellini in 1944 that would prove decisive for his career, with his screenplay for Rossellini’s Open City earning him the first of the four Oscar nominations of his career. In the following years, Amidei came to work with all the major directors of the postwar period, writing or cowriting films for Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luigi Zampa, Luciano Emmer, Mario Monicelli, and Ettore Scola, among others. His screenplay for Rossellini’s Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) earned him another Oscar nomination. For a short period in the 1950s, he also worked as a producer for Colonna Films, a company that he had founded but which folded after producing only a handful of films. Two of the last films he worked on were Marco Ferreri’s Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1981) and Scola’s Il mondo nuovo (That Night in Varennes, 1982); he won the David di Donatello for both. Following his death, an annual prize was instituted in 1982 to honor his memory and to recognize the contribution of screenwriters to the film industry. ANDÒ, ROBERTO (1959–). Essayist, novelist, film critic, screenwriter, and opera, stage, and film director. Despite some early experiences with filmmaking, serving as assistant director to Francesco Rosi on Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979) and to Federico Fellini on E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983), Andò first came to prominence in the artistic sphere for his brilliant theatrical staging of an unpublished narrative text by Italo Calvino, Foresta-Radice-Labirinto (Forest-Roots-Labyrinth, 1987), in which he utilized life-sized marionettes designed by painter Renato Guttuso. While serving as artistic director of the Orestiadi Festival of Gibellina in the early 1990s, and continuing to mount a host of internationally acclaimed theatrical productions, he also completed a series of video documentaries on the work of leading American theater director Robert Wilson, Austrian composer Anton Webern, and English playwright Harold Pinter. His first full-length feature, Diario senza date (Diary without Dates, 1995), a film essay “in fragments” on his native city of Palermo starring Bruno Ganz, received a warm welcome at the Venice Festival that year. In 1999, after directing Claude Debussy’s opera Le martyre de Saint Sebastian at the Teatro Massimo of Palermo, he filmed his second feature, Il manoscritto del principe (The Prince’s Manuscript, 2000), a lyrical and nostalgic recounting of the last years of Sicilian nobleman Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of the historical novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard). The film received Golden Ciak awards for its screenplay and production and costume design, and Andò himself earned a David di Donatello nomination for Best New Director.

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While continuing to direct both opera and theater, in 2002 he also made Il cineasta e il labirinto (The Filmmaker and the Labyrinth), an in-depth documentary on his directorial mentor, Francesco Rosi, for the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Two years later he directed his third feature, Sotto falso nome (Strange Crime, 2004), an intense psychological thriller starring Daniel Auteil, dealing with three themes that insistently recur in Andò’s work: memory, identity, and literature. Repressed memory and hidden identities returned in Viaggio segreto (Secret Journey, 2006), a similarly intense thriller adapted from a novel by Irish writer Josephine Hart, revolving around a long-hidden family secret. Turning more to literature for a period, in 2008 Andò published Diario senza date o della delazione (Diary without Dates or On Informing). Four years later his Il trono vuoto (The Empty Throne, 2012) won both the prestigious Campiello and the Vittorini Prize for a first novel. He returned to the cinema a year later with Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom, 2013), an adaptation of his novel in which a high-ranking Italian politician goes into hiding and is replaced by his genial identical twin brother who has just been released from a mental institution, where he has been treated for a bipolar condition. Read as something of a commentary on Italian politics, the film was nominated for a slew of prizes, winning, among others, two David di Donatello awards (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Valerio Mastrandrea) and a Nastro d’argento for the screenplay (cowritten with Angelo Pasquini). Le confessioni (The Confessions, 2015), a similarly caustic but slightly more abstract satire on global politics, was less critically successful despite showcasing the brilliant acting talents of Toni Servillo as an enigmatic monk called in to officiate spiritually at a secret retreat of G8 ministers of finance. In the same year, regarding it almost as a civic duty, Andò produced Paesaggio civile (Civic Landscape, 2015), a made-for-television documentary that sought to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the weekly magazine L’Espresso, which, in the event, also recorded one of the last appearances of semiotician and writer Umberto Eco. Andò returned to the big screen in 2018 with Una storia senza nome (The Stolen Caravaggio, 2018), a convoluted mystery story that failed to attract the praise and enthusiasm generated by his previous two films. His more general contribution to film culture was nevertheless recognized by that year’s prestigious Capri Patroni Griffi Award. By this time, he had already returned to the stage to direct the 93-year-old Andrea Camilleri, author of the Inspector Montalbano books, in Conversations with Tiresias, a monologue written by Camilleri himself and in a performance critics characterized as “unforgettable.” With foresight, Andò had managed to record the performance on film, to be preserved and available for posterity.

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ANTONELLI, LAURA (1941–2015). Born in Pola (Istria) with the name Laura Antonaz, Antonelli grew up in Naples where her family had relocated as refugees. There she studied at a higher institute for teachers of physical education from which she graduated, having excelled in gymnastics. Moving to Rome in the early 1960s, she began teaching high school although her good looks and undeniable sex appeal soon saw her working as a model and appearing both in the pages of the fotoromanzi and in commercials on the national television program Carosello. A move to films proved to be only a small step away. After a fleeting appearance in Antonio Pietrangeli’s Il magnifico cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold, 1964), she came more to the fore in Mario Bava’s cult comedy and spy spoof Le spie vengono dal semifreddo (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, 1966) and in Riccardo Ghione’s La rivoluzione sessuale (The Sexual Revolution, 1968). After a series of ever more sexually explicit roles in films, which included Massimo Dallamano’s Le malizie di Venere (Devil in the Flesh, 1969) and Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Il merlo maschio (The X-rated Girl, 1971), her coronation as the queen of the erotic dreams of Italian males in the 1970s came with her seductive performance as the beautiful housekeeper enflaming the lust of all the males of the household in Salvatore Samperi’s Malizia (Malicious, 1973), a role that earned her an Italian Golden Globe, a Golden Goblet, and the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. In the meantime, having appeared on French screens with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Les mariés de l’an deux (Swashbuckler, 1971) and Claude Chabrol’s Docteur Popaul (Scoundrel in White, 1972), she was achieving greater notoriety for a tempestuous and very public affair with Belmondo, which would continue for the next nine years. Nevertheless, with her reputation firmly established, for the next three decades she brought her unmistakable erotic charge to a wide variety of films and worked with many leading actors and directors, including Terence Stamp and Michele Placido in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Divina creatura (The Divine Nymph, 1975), with Giancarlo Giannini in Luchino Visconti’s L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976), with Marcello Mastroianni in Marco Vicario’s Mogliamante (Wifemistress, 1977), with Shelley Winters and Max von Sydow in Mauro Bolognini’s Gran Bollito (Black Journal, 1979), and with Vittorio Gassman and Paolo Villaggio in Tonino Cervi’s Il turno (The Turn, 1981). In the late 1980s, she was able to provide firm proof of both her continuing sex appeal and her fine acting talents in La Venexiana (The Venetian Woman, 1986), Mauro Bolognini’s compelling adaptation of the renowned 16th-century comedy, and in L’avaro (The Miser, 1990), Tonino Cervi’s similarly effective adaptation of Molière’s famous comedy.

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Laura Antonelli being watched by the young Alessandro Momo in Salvatore Samperi’s Malizia (Malicious, 1973). Courtesy of Photofest.

In 1991, however, after appearing in a lackluster remake of the film that had established her as a star (Malizia 2mila, 1991, directed again by Samperi), she was entrapped, arrested, and charged with possession of what was deemed to be a trafficable quantity of cocaine. She was subsequently sentenced to three and a half years of house arrest, and although she appealed her conviction, disputing the police’s inaccurate estimate of the amount of the drug found in her possession, it was more than a decade before her conviction was overturned. In the meantime, she continued to suffer from severe depression occasioned in part by unsuccessful plastic surgery, which had left her face disfigured. She thereafter lived in anonymity and penury until her death at the age of 73. In 2010, fellow actor Lino Banfi had discov-

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ered her lamentable financial situation and had petitioned the Italian government in an open letter to increase her meager pension, a request that was finally granted. Through her lawyers Belli had thanked Banfi and the government for easing her condition but had concluded, “Life on earth no longer interests me. I would like to be forgotten.” ANTONIONI, MICHELANGELO (1912–2007). Director, critic, screenwriter, and painter. Universally acknowledged as the foremost representative of cinematic modernism in Italy, Antonioni nurtured an early passion for music and drawing but drifted into a degree in economics at the University of Bologna. He nevertheless continued to cultivate his artistic interests and took an active part in student theater while also publishing fiction and film reviews in the Ferrara daily Corriere padano. In 1939, he moved to Rome, where he became part of the editorial committee of the prestigious journal Cinema, and he briefly attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. In 1942, in between carrying out his military service, he was able to serve as an assistant on Enrico Fulchignoni’s I due Foscari (The Two Foscari, 1942) and to collaborate on the screenplay of Roberto Rossellini’s Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942) before spending a short period in France as an assistant to Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir (The Devil’s Envoys, 1942). On his return to Italy, he began work on his first documentary, Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley, begun 1943 but finished and first screened in 1947). Following the interruption of the war, he worked on the screenplay of Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and made a handful of short award-winning documentaries, among them N.U.—Nettezza Urbana (N.U., 1948), a portrait of Roman street sweepers, and L’amorosa menzogna (Lies of Love, 1949), a look at the then current Italian fad for photoromances, before directing his first full-length feature, Cronaca d’un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950), a noir narrative echoing some of the elements of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). This was followed two years later by I vinti (The Vanquished, 1952), three unconnected stories of juvenile delinquency in the cities of Rome, Paris, and London. Originally financed by a Catholic production company, the film came under strong pressure from the censors both in Italy, where the Italian episode was forced to be modified almost beyond recognition, and in France, where, on the strength of the French episode, the film was banned for more than a decade. Antonioni’s third feature, La signora senze camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953), a wry exposé of the Italian film industry starring former Miss Italia Lucia Bosè, was followed by “Tentato suicidio” (Attempted Suicide), an episode for Cesare Zavattini’s portmanteau film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953). Then came Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), a loose adap-

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tation of a novel by Cesare Pavese that proved to be Antonioni’s first real critical success, winning the Silver Lion at the Venice Festival and two Nastro d’argento awards. Despite the recognizable presence of some of the hallmarks of Antonioni’s mature style in these earlier films, it is generally agreed that Il grido (1957) marks the beginning of a new stage in Antonioni’s filmmaking, a phase characterized by more intense formal and stylistic experimentation and a strong, and almost exclusive, focus on the themes of social disconnectedness and existential alienation. This phase comes to full maturity with the three films usually grouped as his “trilogy of alienation”: L’avventura (1960), La notte (The Night, 1961), and L’eclisse (1962). Many would also include his first film in color, Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), as part of a tetralogy in which Antonioni succeeded in forging a new cinematic language with which to communicate what he saw as the profound social and psychological dislocations provoked by modernity. Antonioni’s international stature, now firmly established, was reconfirmed with Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966). Set in the swinging London of the 1960s and made entirely in English, the film follows the unsuccessful attempts of a British fashion photographer to utilize all the technical resources of photography to uncover the truth of what appears to be a murder in a city park. The film won overwhelming international acclaim, being nominated for a Golden Globe, three BAFTA awards, and two Academy Awards, and winning the Palme d’or at Cannes. Ironically, given that it was made completely in English with a British crew, it also received the Nastro d’argento in Italy for Best Foreign Film. Zabriskie Point (1970), also made completely in English and filmed in the United States, received a more qualified critical response and, despite its countercultural themes, proved to be a commercial flop, especially in the United States, where it received wide public criticism for what was seen as its anti-Americanism. Antonioni then returned to his roots in documentary filmmaking with Chung-Kuo Cina (China, made in 1972 but first shown on Italian television in 1973) before making what many regard as one of the finest of his later films, Professione reporter (The Passenger, 1975). Starring Jack Nicholson in the story of a journalist’s misguided attempt to assume a new identity, The Passenger was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and, in Italy, was awarded the Nastro d’argento for both direction and cinematography. Unable to get a number of other film projects financed, Antonioni then withdrew from the cinema for several years to indulge his earlier passions of painting and writing before returning in 1979 to make Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1980). Adapted from a play by Jean Cocteau and shot completely on video and then converted to film, Oberwald was a courageous experiment by a director who had been praised precisely for his courage to experiment. However, when first screened at Venice in 1980 it re-

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Michelangelo Antonioni and Jack Nicholson on the set of Professione reporter (The Passenger, 1975). Courtesy of Photofest.

ceived a very tepid response, being regarded as little more than a minor exercise in an inferior format. Two years later, Identificazione d’una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982) was much more warmly received both at home and abroad, especially in France, where it was widely hailed as a return to form by the old master. Nevertheless, with a number of projects stalled due to lack of funding, Antonioni returned once more to writing and painting. He published Quel bowling sul Tevere (That Bowling Alley on the Tiber), a

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collection of short stories with Einaudi, and mounted a large exhibition of his paintings in Venice in 1983 before also directing Fotoromanza (1984), a four-minute music video featuring Italian rock singer Gianna Nannini. A year later, with several projects still on hold, Antonioni suffered a major stroke that left him severely paralyzed and unable to speak. While this effectively appeared to end his filmmaking career, in 1995, with the help and support of German director Wim Wenders, he was able to adapt several of his own stories from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber to make Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds, 1995). While the film itself received a mixed critical response, later in the same year his enormous contribution to world cinema was recognized with an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. ARATA, UBALDO (1895–1947). Cinematographer. Arata began his career in films as a cameraman on Augusto Genina’s Il principe dell’impossibile (The Prince of the Impossible, 1918) and subsequently struck up a 10-year partnership with Mario Almirante, with whom he collaborated on a dozen films beginning with Zingari (Gypsies, 1920) and ending with Napoli che canta (Naples Sings, 1930). At the same time, he also worked with Baldassare Negroni on Gli ultimi zar (The Last Tsars, 1926) and Giuditta e Oleferne (Judith and Holofemes, 1928) and with Guido Brignone on Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926); he also helped create the strikingly expressionist atmosphere of Mario Camerini’s Rotaie (Rails, 1929). After serving as director of photography on what is generally regarded as the first Italian sound film, La canzone dell’amore (The Song of Love, 1930), directed by Gennaro Righelli, he collaborated with Max Ophüls on La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman, 1934), after which he teamed up with fellow cinematographer Anchise Brizzi to photograph Carmine Gallone’s ill-fated Roman epic Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal, 1937). In the postwar period, Arata achieved what was perhaps the highest point in his career, working as the cinematographer of Roberto Rossellini’s legendary Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945). He subsequently worked on a number of minor films before teaming up again with Anchise Brizzi on what would be his last film, Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic (1949), which starred Orson Welles as Count Cagliosto. ARCALLI, FRANCO (1929–1978). Editor, screenwriter, and actor. Widely regarded as one of the greatest film editors of early postwar cinema, Arcalli was born in Rome to Venetian parents, but at the age of four, following the death of his father at the hands of Fascists, he moved to Venice to live with an uncle. He grew up in a Communist household and, in 1943, joined the partisans in their armed struggle against the retreating Germans and die-hard

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Fascists. Adopting the battle name Kim, he gained a strong reputation as a valiant fighter and, by December of the following year and still only a teenager, had been appointed commander of the partisan battalion of the district of Venice. Decommissioned at the end of the war but continuing to prefer the name Kim to his given name, he moved through several low-paying jobs while being very active in local cultural circles and film clubs. By the mid-1950s, getting closer to the film industry, he had appeared as an uncredited extra in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954) and Robert Rossen’s Mambo (1954) and collaborated on the direction of a never-released amateur feature film with Renato Dall’Ara. Having struck up a friendship with aspiring filmmaker Tinto Brass, he collaborated on Brass’s own debut feature, Chi lavora è perduto (Who Works Is Lost, 1963), cowriting, assisting in the direction, and playing one of the major roles. After also editing Brass’s Ça ira, il fiume della rivolta (River of Revolt, 1964), he worked as editor on Mauro Bolognini’s “Una donna dolce, dolce” (A Sweet, Sweet Woman), an episode of the anthology film La donna è una cosa meravigliosa (Woman Is a Wonderful Thing, 1964). He subsequently became a close friend and professional collaborator of the writer and maverick director Giulio Questi, helping to write and edit what are regarded as Questi’s major feature films: Se sei vivo spara (Django Kill—If You Live Shoot! 1967), La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg, 1968), and Arcana (1972). By this stage, having already edited Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) Arcalli also initiated a strong professional relationship with the young Bernardo Bertolucci. After creating the dazzling fractured narration of Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970), which Bertolucci would always credit exclusively to him, Arcalli went on to edit Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972) and the monumental Novecento (1900, 1976). He continued to cement his reputation as arguably the most creative film editor in the industry by working with Valerio Zurlini on Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars, 1976) and on Liliana Cavani’s Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977). Tragically, at the very height of his creative powers and flourishing reputation he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away at the age of only 48. At the time of his death, he was apparently working on an early draft of what eventually became the screenplay of Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America (1984). ARCHIBUGI, FRANCESCA (1960–). Actress, screenwriter, and director. Archibugi is one of the most prominent of the young Italian directors who emerged in the late 1980s. Her first love was literature, but she was drawn to the screen after being chosen to play the part of Ottilia in an Italian television adaptation of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. She subsequently studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before also attending Ermanno

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Olmi’s film school, Ipotesi Cinema, where she made a number of promising short films. After honing her screenwriting skills on Bruno Cortini’s L’estate sta finendo (Summer Is Ending, 1987), she wrote and directed her first feature, Mignon é partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay, 1988). An affectionate and moving story of male adolescence and first love, the film was an impressive debut, winning six David di Donatello awards, including Best New Director, and two Silver Ribbons. Archibugi’s next feature, Verso sera (Towards Evening, 1990), highlighting the generation gap that had opened up in Italy with the social upheavals of the 1970s, also won a David for Best Film, as did her third feature, Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin, 1993), a film that centered on the treatment of a young girl with epilepsy, inspired by the alternative psychiatric practices of Marco Lombardo Radice. Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes, 1994), an elegant adaptation of a novel by 19th-century writer Federico Tozzi, was less warmly received, but L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon, 1998), which tackled the complex problem of drug addiction with great sensitivity, was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival where it received the Office Catholique International du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel (OCIC) Award. After exploring the shattered lives of people caught up in the 1997 Umbria earthquake in Domani (Tomorrow, 2001), Archibugi provided an interesting variation on Alessandro Manzoni’s classic 19th-century novel in the television miniseries Renzo e Lucia (2004). She returned to the big screen with Lezioni di volo (Flying Lessons, 2006), another contemporary generational film, this time set in India. There followed Questione di cuore (A Matter of Heart, 2009), the portrayal of a warm friendship that develops between two middle-aged men recovering from heart attacks, and Il nome del figlio (An Italian Name, 2015), a successful Italian rendition of a French stage play (already brought to the screen in France as Le prénom, 2012) in which a group of relatives and friends tussle at dinner over the prospective name of a baby yet to be born. A year later, a chance encounter with a prize-winning collection of poetry by the contemporary Friulian poet and novelist Pierluigi Cappello prompted Parole povere (Poor Words, 2013), a moving documentary that succeeded in finding haunting images with which to supplement a live performance of the disabled poet reading his own verses. Most recently Archibugi returned to the small screen, directing Romanzo famigliare (Family Novel, 2018), a six-part miniseries portraying the intense but difficult relationship between a Jewish mother and her pregnant teenage daughter. ARGENTO, ASIA (1975–). Actress, model, writer, and director. Daughter of cult horror director Dario Argento, Asia began acting at the age of nine in the television miniseries Sogni e bisogni (Dreams and Needs, 1985). Following minor parts in several horror films, she distinguished herself playing the

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lead role in Cristina Comencini’s Zoo (1988). After costarring in Michele Placido’s moving coming-of-age film Le amiche del cuore (Close Friends, 1992), she appeared in Trauma (Daria Argento’s Trauma, 1992), the first of five of her father’s horror films, which would also include La sindrome di Stendhal (Stendhal’s Syndrome, 1996) and Il fantasma dell’opera (The Phantom of the Opera, 1998). Although by this time she had acquired a reputation as the “dark woman” of Italian cinema, she nevertheless went on to play the part of a young disabled woman in Carlo Verdone’s Perdiamoci di vista! (Let’s Not Keep in Touch, 1994), for which she was awarded a David di Donatello. Two years later, she earned another David for her leading role in Peter Del Monte’s Compagna di viaggio (Traveling Companion, 1996). Having by now built an international reputation for difficult female roles, she was called to star in Michael Radford’s taut crime thriller B. Monkey (1998) and Abel Ferrara’s futuristic commercial spy movie New Rose Hotel (1998). At this point, she decided to try her hand at directing, beginning with the short music video La tua lingua sul mio cuore (Your Tongue on My Heart, 1998) and a brief interview-documentary of American director Abel Ferrara, titled Abel/Asia (1998). These shorts were soon followed by the full-length fictional autobiography Scarlet Diva (2000) and a powerful adaptation of J. T. Leroy’s short story anthology, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things (2004). Argento subsequently appeared in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005) and played Madame Du Barry in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). While continuing to flaunt a truculent and transgressive off-screen persona, she also continued to demonstrate a remarkable professional versatility as an actress in films as different as the unmemorable Italian light comedy Baciato dalla fortuna (Kissed by Fortune, 2011), her father’s own Dracula 3D (2012), and the Bengladeshi romantic historical drama Shongram (2014). At the same time, as a director, she drew much critical acclaim for her Incompresa (Misunderstood, 2014), another fictional autobiographical film, this time of herself as a misunderstood child. Despite declaring herself at this stage profoundly disillusioned with the cinema and intending to abandon it in favor of writing, she subsequently returned to the big screen in 2017 in Michele Civetta’s The Executrix, a supernatural horror film set in Tuscany in which a woman is forced to confront the ghosts of her past. In the same year, she was one of the first actresses to publicly accuse Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, thus helping to bring about the widespread #MeToo movement. ARGENTO, DARIO (1940–). Screenwriter, director, and producer. Internationally renowned for his stylish horror films, Argento has often been called the Italian Alfred Hitchcock, while the brilliant visual style of his films has also earned him the title of “the Fellini of Horror.”

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After writing film reviews for the Roman daily Paese sera, Argento moved to screenwriting in the mid-1960s, first collaborating with veteran writer Sergio Amidei on Alberto Sordi’s comedy Scusi, lei è favorevole o contrario? (Pardon Me but Are You For or Against, 1966) and, later, working with Bernardo Bertolucci and others on the screenplay of Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968). He achieved immediate fame, however, with his directorial debut, L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), a giallo clearly influenced by the films of Mario Bava and the popular German Edgar Wallace crime films but already displaying Argento’s own inimitable style. His second film, Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971), another sleek mix of horror thriller and detective fiction, firmly established all the Argento hallmarks: the black-gloved, almost supernatural killer; the gruesome and long, drawn-out murder scenes; and the obsession with eyes and sharp objects. These trademarks all appeared again, to great effect, in the third of the “animal trilogy,” Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971).

Dario Argento directing Marta Gastini and Thomas Kretschmann in Dracula 3D (2012). Courtesy of Photofest.

After Le cinque giornate (Five Days, 1973), an uncharacteristic film set in the Risorgimento period and dealing with political themes, Argento made what many regard as his best and most unnerving horror thriller, Profondo rosso (Deep Red, 1975). Two years later with Suspiria (Dario Argento’s Suspiria, 1977), loosely based on a work on witches by English essayist Thomas De Quincey, Argento moved more decidedly into the supernatural horror genre. Having by this stage set up his own production company,

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SEDA Spettacoli Produzioni, Argento coproduced and collaborated on George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). After the film was finished, Argento reedited it, added a musical score by Italian musical ensemble Goblin, and released the film in Europe as Zombi (Zombie: Dawn of the Dead, 1978), which achieved huge box office success and spawned a host of imitations. His next film, Inferno (Dario Argento’s Inferno, 1980), with a number of sequences designed and shot by Mario Bava, was a hallucinatory excursion into pure nightmare but curiously did very poorly worldwide, prompting Argento to return to the giallo format for his next film, Tenebre (Tenebrae, 1982, also known as Unsane in the United States). Argento’s next effort, Phenomena (1985), a gory thriller revolving around a young girl who has a psychic affinity with insects, was cut by almost 30 minutes when it was released in America under the title Creepers. After a number of other projects, which included filming a fashion show for Trussardi and an advertisement for Fiat cars in Australia, Argento teamed up with Lamberto Bava to produce and cowrite the gruesome supernatural horrorfest Demoni (Demons, 1985) and its sequel, Demoni 2: L’incubo ritorna (Demons 2: The Nightmare Is Back, 1986). Opera (1987), the story of a musical understudy stalked by a murderous psychopath under the influence of too many viewings of A Clockwork Orange, performed very poorly in theatrical release in Italy, and in most other countries it was released only on video. Nevertheless, in the next two years Argento cohosted a television program for giallo afficionados and produced 15 episodes of Turno di notte (Night Shift, 1988), a series of short films about the dark adventures that befall cab drivers at night. After teaming up again with George A. Romero to codirect Due occhi diabolici (Two Evil Eyes, 1990), Argento directed Trauma (1993), the first of his films to be made completely in the United States and starring his daughter, Asia Argento. La sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996) again used Asia to play a young policewoman afflicted with the psychosomatic condition who is brutally raped a number of times before taking a gruesome revenge on the psychopath. Two years later, Il fantasma dell’opera (The Phantom of the Opera, 1998), a fairly brutal retelling of Gaston Leroux’s classic story, flopped miserably at the box office and was generally panned even by aficionados. His first films in the new millennium, Nonhosonno (Sleepless, 2001) and Il cartaio (The Card Player, 2004) revived Argento’s reputation as the undisputed Italian master of the horror thriller but his subsequent Giallo (2009) and Dracula 3D (2012) were poorly rated by even by his most rusted-on fans. Nevertheless, having frequently referenced opera in his films, in 2013 he was commissioned to direct a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth at the Teatro Coccia of Novara. Still something of a living legend, both in Italy and abroad, in 2014 he published his autobiog-

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raphy, appropriately titled Paura (Fear). At the same time, he began crowdfunding for a new film to star iconic punk performer Iggy Pop, which has yet to appear. ASSOCIAZIONE NAZIONALE AUTORI CINEMATOGRAFICI (ANAC; NATIONAL FILM WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION). Founded in Rome in 1952, ANAC brought together directors and screenwriters with the aim of promoting cinema as a means of cultural expression. In the following years, the association was active in attempting to influence government policy regarding the industry and the management of important events such as the Venice Festival. The heated atmosphere of 1968 prompted a division in the association between those who wanted it to function along the lines of a trade union to protect the rights of workers in the industry, and who thus broke away to form the Associazione Autori Cinematografici Italiani (AACI), and others who preferred to be part of a looser cultural association and who remained part of ANAC. The association continued to be active in the 1970s and, in 1980, became one of the founding members of the Fédération Européenne des Réalisateurs de 1’Audiovisuel. It also worked closely with the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini (National Association of Film and Affiliated Industries, now the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali) to continue to lobby for a better regulatory framework for the film industry in Italy, which would more effectively safeguard the rights of authors. Since 2004, the association has run Le Giornate degli Autori, a week of parallel screenings and discussions within the ambit of the Venice Festival, dedicated to acknowledging the work of screenwriters. As well as promoting the general interests of Italian cinema, the association has more recently also founded the Italian Coalition for Cultural Diversity. ASSOCIAZIONE NAZIONALE INDUSTRIE CINEMATOGRAFICHE AUDIOVISIVE E MULTIMEDIALI (ANICA; NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FILM AND AFFILIATED AUDIOVISUAL AND MULTIMEDIA INDUSTRIES). Officially founded in Rome on 10 July 1944 as the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini (National Association of Cinematographic and Related Industries), ANICA is the umbrella organization that brings together the various unions representing the major areas and activities of the Italian film industry, including production, promotion, distribution, exhibition, and technical services. As such, it publishes the trade magazine Cinema oggi (Cinema Today) and represents the industry on government boards and commissions. As the officially desig-

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nated representative of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it organizes the Italian nomination in the Best Foreign Film category of the Oscars. Since 1958, it has also been the official cosponsor of the David di Donatello Awards. Its website (www.anica.it) now provides a wealth of up-to-date information regarding all aspects of the Italian film industry and an easily searchable archive of film production and box office statistics for the last 10 years. ASTI, ADRIANA (1931–). Actress. Born Adelaide Aste, Asti is one of Italy’s most respected actresses, and her prolific career has spanned the entire postwar period. She made her acting debut in 1951 at the Teatro Stabile of Bolzano and four years later she achieved her first major triumph playing the female lead in a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, directed by Luchino Visconti. While pursuing her acting career onstage, in the late 1950s she also began appearing in films. After small parts in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (Accattone!, 1961), she gave one of her most memorable performances as Gina, the protagonist’s neurotic aunt and lover, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964). She subsequently appeared, among other roles, as the wife in Susan Sontag’s Duett foor kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals, 1969), as Lila Von Buliowski in Visconti’s Ludwig (1973), as the daughter in Mauro Bolognini’s L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance, 1976), and as Felicita in Giorgio Ferrara’s adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s novella Un cuore semplice (A Simple Heart, 1977). After playing Ennia in Tinto Brass’s Caligola (Caligula, 1979), she largely withdrew from the cinema in the 1980s to again work mostly in theater, both in Italy and in France. With her stage career continuing to flourish, in the 1990s she wrote and directed several of her own plays and appeared in a number of Italian and French television miniseries. She returned to the big screen playing a mischievous comic role in Giorgio Ferrara’s Tosca e altre due (Tosca and the Women, 2003) while also giving a very moving performance as the mother in Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which she shared the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. Indefatigable by nature, and now well into her 80s, she continued to work both onstage and in the cinema, eliciting much praise for a back-to-back performance at the 2013 Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds of two pieces by Jean Cocteau, La voce umana (The Human Voice) and Il Bell’Indifferente (The Beautiful Indifferent One), and for her appearance as Pasolini’s mother, Susanna, in Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2014), for which she was awarded a Special Silver Ribbon. In 2015, her life and work became the subject of the documentary A.A. Professione attrice (A.A. Profession Actress), directed by

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Rocco Talucci. More recently she has also published her autobiography, Un futuro infinito: Piccolo autobiografia (An Infinite Future: Brief Autobiography, 2017) before appearing in a small but significant role in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Nome di donna (Name of Woman, 2018). AVATI, PUPI (1938–). Director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, and clarinetist. A prolific and popular but extremely eclectic director, Pupi (short for Giuseppe) Avati has directed some 50 feature films and television series, which have ranged widely across a variety of genres to include everything from gothic horror to musicals, historical dramas to romantic comedies. After failing to complete a degree in political science at the University of Bologna, Avati played clarinet in a jazz band for several years before fortuitously seizing the opportunity to independently finance his first film, Balsamus, l’uomo di Satana (Blood Relations, 1970), a bizarre and rather surreal tale about a dwarf with presumed magical powers. In both subject and style, the film, now apparently lost, displayed that propensity for the absurd and the grotesque, which would frequently reappear in Avati’s subsequent films. It was quickly followed by the equally quirky gothic fantasy Thomas e gli indemoniati (Thomas and the Bewitched, 1970), which, however, failed to find a distributor and so never achieved a theatrical release. Avati’s career in films thus only effectively began five years later with the irreverent satirical comedy La mazurka del barone, della santa e del fico fiorone (The Mazurka of the Baron, 1975) and Bordella (House of Pleasure for Women, 1976), a provocative musical set in a brothel for women, which was severely attacked by the censors for its alleged affront to public morals. After collaborating with Pier Paolo Pasolini on the screenplay of Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975)—and several other successful forays into the gothic and horror genres with La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows, 1976), Tutti defunti . . . tranne i morti (All Deceased Except for the Dead, 1977), and Le strelle nel fosso (The Stars in the Ditch, 1979)—Avati returned to two of his old passions, jazz and cinema, with the extended television miniseries Jazz Band (three episodes, 1978) and Cinema!!! (four episodes, 1979). He produced another classic horror thriller, Zeder (1983), before changing direction and style completely with Una gita scolastica (A School Outing, 1983), the nostalgic re-creation of a romantic school outing in an idealized Tuscan countryside at the beginning of World War I. Subsequent films continued to alternate between the past and the present with Noi tre (The Three of Us, 1984), depicting a short period of time that the young Mozart spent in Avati’s native Bologna in 1770, followed by Impiegati (Bank Clerks, 1985), a caustic portrayal of Italian yuppie culture in the early 1980s. Set in the 1950s, Festa di laurea (Graduation Party, 1985) pitilessly recounted an unmitigated

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fiasco in place of the celebration announced in the title, while the similarly ironically titled Regalo di Natale (Christmas Present, 1986) focused on a harrowing all-night poker game set in contemporary times. The late 1980s brought forth one of Avati’s most-loved films, Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze (Story of Boys and Girls, 1989). Reliving all the stages of an extended engagement dinner prepared by the girl’s rural family for the urban middle-class family of the groom-to-be, the film received the Nastro d’argento for Best Direction and both the Silver Ribbon and the David di Donatello for Best Screenplay. Two years later Bix, un ipotesi leggendaria (Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend, 1991), Avati’s affectionate portrait of legendary American jazz musician and composer Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, was similarly awarded a David for its meticulous production design and was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. Avati’s long-held fascination with the Middle Ages produced Magnificat (1993) before he returned to the gothic genre with L’arcano incantatore (The Mysterious Enchanter, 1996) and to his native countryside of Emilia at the end of the 19th century in his romantic comedy Il testimone dello sposo (The Best Man, 1997), which was nominated for a Golden Globe and proposed as Italy’s candidate for Best Foreign Film at the 1998 Academy Awards. Avati’s subsequent films in the new millennium continued to range widely, from another foray into the Middle Ages in I cavallieri che fecero l’impresa (The Knights of the Quest, 2001) to Il cuore altrove (Incantato, 2003), an unusual love story set in Bologna in the early 1900s. A year later he was able to create an effective sequel to his earlier Il regalo di Natale in La rivincita di Natale (Christmas Rematch, 2004) and found a way to bring together all his favorite themes of friendship, music, and coming of age in Ma quando arrivano le ragazze? (When Will the Girls Arrive?, 2005). At the same time, with La seconda notte di nozze (The Second Wedding Night, 2005) he furnished mature opera star Katia Ricciarelli with the opportunity to make her film debut in a zany love story set in the immediate postwar period. The film, as eccentric as any Avati ever produced, was nominated for the Golden Lion award at Venice, with Ricciarelli herself being awarded a Nastro d’ argento for her performance. Two years later, La cena per farli conoscere (A Dinner for Them to Meet, 2007) was a bittersweet comedy in which a declining middle-aged television star (Diego Abatantuono), deep in the throes of a midlife crisis and on the brink of suicide, is rehabilitated through a dinner organized by his three daughters from three different mothers. In the same year, he veered back to the horror mystery genre with Il nascondiglio (The Hideout, 2007) before making Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father, 2008), the moving story of a father’s enduring love for a mentally fragile daughter, which brought both Silvio Orlando, as the father, and Alba Rohrwacher, as Giovanna, the David di Donatello for their lead roles, with Orlando also receiving the Pasinetti Award and the Volpi Cup at the Venice

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Festival. Two years later, Una sconfinata giovinezza (A Second Childhood, 2010) offered a similarly moving and very poetic portrayal of a mature couple’s response to the husband’s contraction of Alzheimer’s disease. After the romantic love story of Il cuore grande delle ragazze (The Big Heart of Girls, 2011) and the difficult childhood narrated in the made-for-television Il bambino cattivo (The Bad Child, 2013), Avati wrote and directed Un matrimonio (A Marriage, 2013–2014), a six-part series made for RAI national television that recounted a marriage, very much like Avati’s own, which had navigated, and thus endured through, all the social and cultural changes of 50 years of postwar Italian history. At the same time, he published his own account of his life and times in La grande invenzione: Un’autobiografia (The Great Invention: An Autobiography, 2013). He remained on the small screen with the made-for-television Con il sole negli occhi (With Sun in the Eyes, 2015) while also publishing his first novel, Il ragazzo in soffitta (The Boy in the Attic, 2015). Three years later he published his second novel, a gothic tale of satanic possession in Venice in the 1950s, which he has most recently adapted in his return to the big screen—and coincidentally to his cinematic beginnings—in Il signor diavolo (Mister Devil, 2019).

B BACALOV, LUIS ENRIQUEZ (1933–2017). Pianist, musical arranger, and film composer. Born in Argentina of Bulgarian parents, Bacalov studied classical piano from the age of five under the renowned music teacher Enrique Barenboim. After years of extensive tours through South America, and a four-year stay in Colombia, he migrated to Europe and spent some time in Spain and France before settling in Italy in 1959. Being very open, despite his classical training, to the developments in popular music occurring at the time, he was hired as composer, arranger, and pianist by Fonit Cetra and then RCA in Rome and thus contributed to the successful launch of the careers of many emerging popular singers such as Gianni Morandi, Rita Pavone, and Milva. At the same time, he established a close and very productive working relationship with Italian songwriter and lyricist Sergio Endrigo, while also collaborating with iconic Italian progressive rock bands Osanna and the New Trolls. By this time, he had already made his entry into the Italian film industry, beginning with the music for Eduardo De Filippo’s Questi Fantasmi (These Phantoms, 1954). By the early 1960s, he was alternating between scoring some of the madcap comedies of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia as well as “quality” art films such as Damiano Damiani’s La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1963) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to Matthew, 1964), his arrangements for the latter earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Musical Adaptation. From the mid-1960s, beginning with Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), he produced the soundtrack for close to a dozen Spaghetti Westerns, including Damiano Damiani’s Quién sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967) and the comic I quattro del Pater Noster (In the Name of the Father, 1969) before moving on to work regularly with the poliziesco, providing the pounding scores for, among others, Fernando di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 (Caliber 9, 1972), Il poliziotto è marcio (Shoot First, Die Later, 1974), Colpo in canna (Loaded Guns, 1975), and I padroni della città (Rulers of the City, 1976). Moving back to art cinema he subsequently composed the music for Federico Fellini’s La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980) but also worked for Italian 55

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television on miniseries such as L’assassino ha le ore contate (The Killer Is on Borrowed Time, six episodes, 1981) and Voglia di cantare (Urge to Sing, four episodes, 1985). The highest point in his film career appeared to come in 1996 when he was awarded the Oscar, and in Italy had already received the Nastro d’argento, for the original musical score of Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman, 1994). The triumph was unfortunately short lived due to a charge of plagiarism brought against him by his former partner, Endrigo, thereby initiating an acrid legal battle that continued well after Endrigo’s death in 2005 and only settled in 2013 when, exasperated with the lack of a firm ruling from the Italian courts examining the case, Bacalov agreed to officially share credit with Endrigo for the disputed score. In the new millennium, while continuing to work with the classical repertoire as artistic director of the Orchestra della Magna Grecia of Taranto, he taught musical composition for film at the Accademia Chiggiana in Siena and scored some 20 more films, his final score being for Michael Radford’s Elsa & Fred (2014). In 2003, his contribution to cinema was recognized with the award of a Special Nastro d’argento but perhaps an even greater homage came in the same year when Quentin Tarantino chose to include part of Bacalov’s score for Giancarlo Santi’s Il grande duello (The Grand Duel, 1972) in the soundtrack of Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and, subsequently, using Bacalov’s theme song for Corbucci’s Django for his own Django Unchained (2012). BARAGLI, NINO (1925–2013). Editor. One of the most respected editors in the Italian film industry, Baragli learned his craft while working as assistant to Eraldo Da Roma before graduating to full editor in the early 1950s on a number of light comedies directed by Giorgio Simonelli. He subsequently collaborated with all the major Italian directors in a career that spanned more than 200 films. Beginning with Accattone (Accattone!, 1961), he supervised the editing of all the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, worked with Sergio Leone on all his films from Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966) to C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984), and collaborated with Mauro Bolognini on all his major works. After editing Federico Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986), Intervista (Fellini’s Intervista, 1987), and La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), for which he received his first David di Donatello, Baragli also began working with many of the younger generation of directors, earning a second David for Best Editing of Gabriele Salvatores’s Oscar-winning, Mediterraneo (1991). Having retired from the industry, in 1998 he was awarded a Special Nastro d’argento in recognition of his career achievement.

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BARATTOLO, GIUSEPPE (1882–1949). Lawyer, politician, financier, and producer. An influential presence in the Italian film industry during the silent period, Barattolo began as a distributor but in 1913 he founded the production company Caesar Film, which quickly succeeded in attracting rising star and soon-to-be diva Francesca Bertini into its ranks and went on to produce some of the most significant films of the silent period, including the first of the Za-la-Mort films, Nelly la gigolette (Nelly, 1914) and Gustavo Serena’s legendary Assunta Spina (1915). During the crisis that developed in the film industry in the period following World War I, Barattolo became one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union), and his viability as a producer declined with its fading fortunes. Between 1931 and 1934, he tried, but ultimately failed, to reestablish Caesar Film as a force in Italian film production. In 1937, he joined the Scalera Film company and, in 1942, was instrumental in setting up a branch of the Scalera studios in Venice. After the war, in partnership with his brother, Gaetano, he worked briefly as an independent producer. BARBAGALLO, ANGELO (1958–). Producer. After working as production manager on Marco Bellocchio’s Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth, 1982), Barbagallo teamed up with actor-director Nanni Moretti to establish Sacher Film, with which he began producing not only all of Moretti’s own films but also the directorial debuts of several of the most promising of the younger directors, among them Carlo Mazzacurati’s Notte italiana (Italian Night, 1987) and Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), a film that earned him his first Nastro d’argento as Best Producer. In the new millennium, he scored his greatest successes, both locally and internationally, with Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003) and Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), both of which brought him two more Davids and Silver Ribbons. He subsequently parted ways with Sacher in order to set up his own independent production company, BiBi Film, with which he has continued to produce a host of distinctive films, among them Roberto Andò’s quirky Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom, 2013) and Le confessioni (The Confessions, 2016), both of which earned him David di Donatello nominations for Best Film. Most recently the company has veered toward television production, the latest being Giacomo Campiotti’s telemovie Liberi di scegliere (Free to Chooose, 2018) and Renato De Maria’s four-part miniseries Lo spietato (The Ruthless, 2019). One of Italy’s most respected independent producers, Barbagallo has for many years (2008–2014) also served as the president of the Associazione Produttori Indipendenti (Independent Producers Association).

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BARBARO, UMBERTO (1902–1959). Film theorist, playwright, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. A self-taught Marxist writer and intellectual active in a wide variety of cultural fields, Barbaro was deeply influenced by the film theories of Béla Bálazs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, whose work he was the first to translate and make known in Italy. While working as a literary critic, editor, translator, novelist, and playwright, in the late 1920s Barbaro also developed a passionate interest in film and so became part of the group of writers and intellectuals that had formed around Alessandro Blasetti’s film journal, Cinematografo. With Blasetti and others he joined the reborn Cines studios during Emilio Cecchi’s period as artistic director there in the early 1930s. With Cecchi’s encouragement, he made two labor documentaries, Una giornata nel cantiere di Monfalcone (A Day at the Monfalcone Shipyard, 1932) and Cantieri sull’Adriatico (Shipyards of the Adriatic Coast, 1933), both demonstrating the strong influence of Sergei Eisenstein and the Russian school. While at the Cines he also worked as a screenwriter, most notably on Goffredo Alessandrini’s light comedy Seconda B (1934). In 1935, despite his known Marxist orientation, he was called to teach at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia by its first director, Luigi Chiarini. Together with Chiarini he founded the Centro’s official journal, Bianco e nero, and produced a number of teaching documentaries related to different aspects of filmmaking. Between 1944 and 1947, he served as director of the Centro, following which he also taught at the Polish Film Institute. More of a theorist than a practitioner, he only ever directed one feature film, L’ultima nemica (The Last Enemy, 1938). BAVA, LAMBERTO (1944–). Director, screenwriter, and producer. Son of cinematographer and director Mario Bava, Lamberto Bava followed in his father’s footsteps to become a prolific director and producer in the horror film genre. After assisting his father on a host of films and working as assistant director on Mario Lanfranchi’s Il bacio (The Kiss of Death, 1974) and Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World, 1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), he directed his first feature, Macabro (1980), cowritten with Pupi Avati. He subsequently made more than 20 horror thrillers and gialli, coming to be best known among aficionados of the genre for La casa con la scala nel buio (A Blade in the Dark, 1983), Le foto di Gioia (Delirium, 1987), Demoni (Demons, 1985), and its equally terrifying sequel, Demoni 2: L’incubo ritorna (Demons 2: The Nightmare Is Back, 1986). In the 1990s, he became better known to mainstream audiences for his rather more traditional television fairy-tale series, Fantaghirò (The Cave of the Golden Rose, 1991–1996). He subsequently worked almost exclusively for television, most recently directing three episodes of the Canale 5 miniseries 6 passi nel giallo (2012).

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BAVA, MARIO (1914–1980). Writer, cinematographer, and director. Now internationally acknowledged as the master of Italian B-grade horror films, Bava learned the craft of special effects photography from his father, Eugenio, a set and special effects designer and cinematographer of the silent era. By the early 1930s, Bava had joined his father at the Istituto LUCE and helped photograph two of Roberto Rossellini’s earliest shorts, La vispa Teresa (Lively Theresa, 1939) and Il tacchino prepotente (The Bullying Turkey, 1939). He subsequently joined the Scalera studios and worked as a camera operator on Francesco De Robertis’s Uomini sul fondo (Men on the Sea Floor, 1941) and Rossellini’s La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941) before graduating to cinematographer on Luigi Menardi’s L’avventura di Annabella (Annabella’s Adventure, 1943). In the immediate postwar period, he made a number of documentaries before initiating a partnership with director Pietro Francisci, for whom he photographed Natale al campo 119 (Christmas at Camp 119, 1948) and Antonio di Padova (Anthony of Padua, 1949). After also working with, among others, Steno and Mario Monicelli on Vita da cani (A Dog’s Life, 1950) and Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951) and Mario Camerini on Gli eroi della domenica (Sunday Heroes, 1952), he provided sets, special effects, cinematography, and (uncredited) codirection for Riccardo Freda’s seminal I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire, 1957). He then worked with Francisci again on Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1958), the film that initiated the peplum genre, before making his solo directorial debut with La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960), the film with which he is generally regarded as having laid the cornerstone for the Italian horror genre. There followed Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules and the Haunted World, 1961), an interesting mixture of the peplum and horror genres, and the Viking adventure fantasy Gli invasori (Erik the Conqueror, 1961) before La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Evil Eye, 1962), regarded by many as the first true giallo. This was quickly followed by several more accomplished, if small-budget, exercises in gothic horror, including I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath, 1963), composed of three separate stories (one of which starred the legendary actor Boris Karloff), and La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body, 1963), made under the pseudonym John M. Old. A year later, 6 donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) confirmed Bava’s unequalled mastery of the giallo. Ever resourceful and versatile, Bava then tried his hand at a Western, La strada per Fort Alamo (The Road to Fort Alamo, 1964), before merging science fiction with horror in Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965), a film that in many ways anticipated Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). After the hilarious spy-film spoof Le spie vengono dal semifreddo (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, 1966), Bava returned to the

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supernatural horror genre with Operazione paura (Kill, Baby, Kill, 1966), which he followed with the stylish, if rather kitschy, adaptation of the exploits of the comic book master criminal, Diabolik (1968). After another foray into the Western genre, Bava returned to the giallo with 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto (5 Dolls for an August Moon, 1970), loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, which was quickly followed by Ecologia del delitto (A Bay of Blood, 1971) and Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga (Baron Blood, 1972), both of which were generally regarded as disappointing work coming from the master. Lisa e il diavolo (Lisa and the Devil)—made in 1972 but only released internationally in 1975 in a much reedited version (and retitled La casa dell’ esorcismo [The House of Exorcism] in order to cash in on the release of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist)—also proved to be something of a flop. His final feature, Schock (Beyond the Door II, 1977), the story of an apparently possessed child, similarly failed to restore his stocks. After codirecting an episode of a television compilation film, Il giorno del diavolo (The Day of the Devil, 1978), with his son, Lamberto, Bava’s last contribution to film was as assistant and visual effects director on Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980). BELLOCCHIO, MARCO (1939–). Screenwriter and director. The most prominent representative of a confrontational cinema that voiced the revolt of the immediate postwar generation against what they regarded as the moral bankruptcy of their fathers, Bellocchio graduated in philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan before moving to Rome in 1959 to study acting and directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After a further year of study at the London Slade School of Art, during which he came into contact with the Angry Young Man movement, he returned to Italy to make his first feature film, I pugni in tasca (Fists in His Pocket, 1965), a provocative film in which Alessandro, a surly young epileptic, eventually kills three members of his own family. The film outraged the Italian establishment but received much critical acclaim and a host of prizes, including a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story, thereby establishing Bellocchio’s reputation as an uncompromising young director. Two years later, his second feature, La Cina è vicina (China Is Near, 1967), was equally provocative but more expressly political in its iconoclasm. Bellocchio subsequently joined the 1968 movement, directing two patently militant political documentaries, Paola (1969) and Viva il Primo Maggio rosso e proletario (Long Live Red May Day, 1969). After directing a strongly politicized production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the Teatro Piccolo of Milan, Bellocchio abandoned the movement but went on to make Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father, 1972), a fierce and full-frontal attack on the Catholic boarding school system in which he himself had spent his adolescence.

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Following Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One, 1972), a caustic critique of the conservative press that was a project he had taken over from screenwriter-director Sergio Donati, Bellocchio joined forces with Silvano Agosti and screenwriters Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia to make Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1974), a critical examination of the treatment of the mentally insane in Italy. This was followed by Marcia trionfale (Victory March, 1976), a ferocious attack on the Italian military system, before he turned to television, for which he produced an unconventional but highly praised adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (Il gabbiano, 1977), and La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine, 1978), a five-episode series on the cinema itself. He returned to the big screen with Salto nel vuoto (Leap into the Void, 1980), another study of a decadent middle-class family, and Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth, 1982) before another highly praised television adaptation, this time of Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1984). Again for the big screen he directed Il diavolo in corpo (The Devil in the Flesh, 1986) and La condanna (The Conviction, 1991), two highly contested films, not least for the strong influence exercised over both of them by the controversial anti-Freudian psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli. Il sogno della farfalla (The Butterfly’s Dream, 1994), the story of an actor who recites words onstage but renounces the use of language in his everyday life, won the Silver Lion at Berlin and was followed by the polished period piece Il principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1996) and La balia (The Nanny, 1999), loosely adapted from a short story by Pirandello. His reputation as a first-rate director was strongly revived by L’ora di religione—il sorriso di mia madre (The Religion Hour— My Mother’s Smile, 2002), another conflicted family drama that received six David di Donatello nominations and the Special Mention at Cannes, and Buongiorno notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003), a deeply moving but unsentimental film reimagining, with a more positive outcome, the 1978 kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. Three years later, the multilayered but open-ended Il regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director, 2006) was as much a reflection on filmmaking itself as social critique but received only a lukewarm reception whereas Vincere (2009), a powerful portrait of Benito Mussolini’s ruthless repudiation of his first wife, Ida Dalser, was a commercial and critical triumph, winning, among others, eight David di Donatello and four Nastro d’argento awards. The ironically titled Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty, 2012) returned to recent history, being based on the case of Eluana Englaro, a young woman forcibly kept alive in a vegetative state for 17 years whose death, finally, in 2009, had revealed a country deeply divided between passionate opponents and fervent advocates of euthanasia. The two parallel but seemingly unconnected stories of Sangue del mio sangue (Blood of My Blood, 2015) again drew something of a blank from critics and audiences alike, but a year later, he returned to form with Fai

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bei sogni (Sweet Dreams, 2016), which received six David nominations, including for Best Film and Best Director. Such a return to first-rate filmmaking has been abundantly reconfirmed with his most recent contribution, Il traditore (The Traitor, 2019), a biopic of Tommaso Buscetta, the first Italian Mafia boss to turn state’s witness. The film received a 13-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes and in Italy took out seven of its 11 nominations for the Nastro d’argento, including the awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Score. BELLUCCI, MONICA (1964–). Model and actress. Bellucci began modeling while studying law at the University of Perugia and soon abandoned her legal studies in favor of the fashion catwalks of Milan, Paris, and New York. Her acting career began in 1990 when she appeared on Italian television opposite Giancarlo Giannini in the telemovie Vita coi figli (Life with the Children, 1990), directed by veteran Dino Risi. Her first feature film role was as the beautiful widow forced to raffle herself off in order to survive in Francesco Laudadio’s La riffa (The Raffle, 1991), which was followed by a small part as one of Dracula’s seductive three brides in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Her subsequent appearance in a number of Italian films failed to bring out her real talent, but her role as Lisa in the French thriller L’appartement (The Apartment, 1996) earned her a prestigious César nomination. She appeared in mostly French films from then on, frequently alongside Vincent Cassel, whom she would later marry. She was called to America again in 2000 to play opposite Gene Hackman in the crime thriller Under Suspicion, but in the same year, she achieved greater international renown in the title role of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malèna (2000). Bellucci went on to play what was perhaps the most demanding role of her career as the woman mercilessly raped and beaten in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (Irreversible, 2002). She returned to Hollywood to play opposite Bruce Willis in Antoine Fuqua’s bigbudget action movie Tears of the Sun (2003), and she also took on the role of Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). At the same time, her performance as Alessia in Gabriele Muccino’s Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love, 2003) brought her the critical recognition of the Nastro d’argento for Best Supporting Actress. She subsequently continued to alternate between international and Italian productions, appearing in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (2005) and Bernard Blier’s Combien tu m’aimes? (How Much Do You Love Me?, 2005) before playing Baroness Emilia Speziali in Paolo Virzì’s N (Io e Napoleone) (Napoleon and Me, 2006). While walking her way through fairly light roles in Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’amore 2 (2007) and Manuale d’am3re (Ages of Love, 2011), she was also able to provide an extremely powerful performance as Luisa Ferida, the actress summarily executed by Italian partisans in 1945 on suspi-

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cion of having been a Fascist collaborator, in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood, 2008). After working with Tornatore again, although in a minor role, in Baarìa (2009), she costarred in Bahman Ghobadi’s Fasle Kargadan (Rhino Season, 2012) before shining as the Fellini-esque television anchorwoman Milly Catena in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders (2014). Although now in her mature years, she was able to play the beautiful Mafia widow, Donna Lucia, seducing James Bond in Sam Mendes’s Spectre (2015) and the Bride in Emir Kusturica’s On the Milky Road (2016). Her most recent appearance on the big screen has been in a supporting role in Claude Lelouch’s Les plus belles années d’une vie (The Best Years of a Life, 2019), the director’s revisitation of his famous Un homme et un femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966) made 50 years earlier. BENE, CARMELO (1937–2002). Actor, writer, and theater and film director. The unrivaled enfant terrible of Italian postwar theater, Bene studied briefly at the National Academy for Dramatic Art in Rome before abandoning it to form his own theater company. Beginning with an adaptation of Albert Camus’s Caligula (1959), he became the foremost representative of an uncompromisingly iconoclastic and experimental form of theater, cultivating an extravagant baroque tendency both on and off the stage. He made his first appearance in film playing the character of a priest in Franco Indovina’s Lo scatenato (Catch as Catch Can, 1967), followed by the role of Creon in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967). A year later, after making the short Hermitage (1968), he directed himself in an adaptation of his own novel, La signora dei turchi (Our Lady of the Turks, 1968), which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival but in the event was awarded the Special Jury Prize. This was followed by Capricci (1969); Don Giovanni (1971), which interwove Shakespearean sonnets with a short story by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly; and a version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1972). A year later, Un Amleto di meno (One Hamlet Less, 1973) brilliantly combined elements of Shakespeare’s play with the poetry of Jules Laforgue, earning the work a nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes. After this frenetic series of visually baroque “antifilms,” Bene abandoned the cinema in order to devote himself to theater, writing, and music. He returned to the small screen in the late 1990s with Macbeth horror suite di Carmelo Bene da William Shakespeare (Macbeth Horror Suite, 1997) and an iconoclastic version of the children’s classic Pinocchio ovvero lo spettacolo della provvidenza (Pinocchio, 1999). BENIGNI, ROBERTO (1952–). Actor and director. The most effusive member of the new generation of actor-directors who emerged in the 1980s, Benigni had already begun to make his mark in the mid-1970s as a cabaret

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performer. Following the success of his lively comic monologues on national television, he made his first appearance on the big screen in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Berlinguer, ti voglio bene (Berlinguer, I Love You, 1977), which attempted to bring to the screen the character Cioni Mario that had been so popular onstage and on television. A tepid reception to the film prompted a retreat back to television, where he gained a cult following as the zany film critic on Renzo Arbore’s popular variety program L’altra domenica (The Other Sunday). He returned to the cinema in 1979, taking small parts in Costa-Gavras’s Clair de femme (Womanlight, 1979) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (Luna, 1979) before finding his mark as the lovable nursery school teacher in Marco Ferreri’s Chiedo asilo (Seeking Asylum, 1979). He subsequently appeared in major roles in Sergio Citti’s Il minestrone (1981), Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986) and Night on Earth (1991), Federico Fellini’s La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), and Blake Edwards’s The Son of the Pink Panther (1993). By this time, he was directing himself in his own films, beginning with Tu mi turbi (You Disturb Me, 1983), a four-episode film that toyed gently with religious themes, before teaming up with fellow comic actor and director Massimo Troisi in Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry, 1984). With Il piccolo diavolo (The Little Devil, 1988), Benigni initiated a fruitful long-term partnership with screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami, who collaborated on all of Benigni’s subsequent films, including Johnny Stecchino (Johnny Toothpick, 1991) and Il mostro (The Monster, 1994). Already something of a national hero, Benigni achieved international fame with his La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997), which broke box office records and received a plethora of awards, including three Oscars, nine David di Donatello awards, and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Pinocchio (2002) was judged less successful by the critics, but La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005), a romantic comedy set in war-torn Baghdad, was better received, winning a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story and David di Donatello nominations for Best Music and Best Special Effects. Benigni subsequently abandoned the big screen and for the next decade, with the exception of a guest appearance in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012), appeared mainly onstage and on television. His public readings of Dante, effervescent and learned at the same time, were attended by thousands in the piazze and watched by millions on television. In November 2011, with typical verve (and preceded by several satirical barbs directed at Silvio Berlusconi), he recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno before the assembled European Parliament. In 2014, his two-evening one-man commentary on the 10 Commandments, broadcast on national television, attracted 10 million enthusiastic viewers, one of them being Pope Francis, who subsequently phoned through his congratulations. Having already been nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his contribution to the performing arts, in

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2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto, and two years later in Italy he received a Special David for his overall career. There are reports that he will soon be returning to the big screen in Matteo Garrone’s forthcoming Pinocchio. BENTIVOGLIO, FABRIZIO (1957–). Actor, screenwriter, and director. One of the most accomplished of the young actors who emerged in the 1980s, Bentivoglio studied at the school of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan and worked on the stage before making his film debut as the young Dumas in Mauro Bolognini’s La storia vera della signora delle camelie (Lady of the Camelias, 1981). After appearing in a handful of minor parts and then taking major roles in Gabriele Salvatores’s Marrakech Express (1989) and Turné (1990), which he cowrote, he won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Festival in 1993 for his powerful performance in Silvio Soldini’s Un’anima divisa in due (A Soul Split in Two). He subsequently became one of the best-known faces on the Italian screen, appearing in, among a host of others, Giacomo Campiotti’s Come due coccodrilli (Like Two Crocodiles, 1994), Michele Placido’s Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero, 1995), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Le affinità elettive (Elective Affinities, 1996), and Pasquale Pozzessere’s Testimone a rischio (An Eyewitness Account, 1997), where his role as the courageous witness willing to testify to having seen a Mafia killing earned him his first David di Donatello award. He was awarded a second David for his supporting role in Placido’s Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love, 1998), and a year later his first attempt at directing himself in Tipota (1999) earned him a nomination for the David for Best Short Film. In the new millennium, he continued to give sterling performances, as the father having an affair with an earlier lover in Gabriele Muccino’s enormously popular Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love, 2003), as the elder brother in Sergio Rubini’s mystery thriller La terra (Our Land, 2006), and perhaps most movingly as the middle-aged journalist and husband succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease in Pupi Avati’s Una sconfinata giovinezza (A Second Childhood, 2010). His appearance as the hapless money-hungry estate agent and would-be rampant entrepreneur in Paolo Virzì’s adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital (Il capitale umano, 2014) earned him a second Nastro d’argento. After having long avoided working for television, Bentivoglio then achieved a great popularity on the small screen by playing a tough, Mafiabusting carabiniere, Lieutenant Colonel Sergio Spada, in the eight-episode miniseries Romanzo siciliano (A Sicilian Novel, 2016). He returned to the big screen in the minor but significant role of Santino Recchia in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro (2018) before playing Tony, a mature gay father struggling to explain to his family why he now wants to marry Carlo, another father, trying to do the same with his family in Simone Godano’s Croce e

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delizia (An Almost Ordinary Summer, 2019). At the same time, he reappeared on television as Remigio da Varagine in the RAI eight-part series Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 2019). BENVENUTI, LEONARDO (1923–2000). Screenwriter. After studying classics at university, Benvenuti began what would be a long and successful screenwriting career collaborating on the screenplays of a half dozen light comedies featuring comic actor Erminio Macario before also helping to write Carmine Gallone’s Puccini (1953) and Raffaello Matarazzo’s Giuseppe Verdi (The Life and Music of Giuseppe Verdi, 1953). While working on Valerio Zurlini’s Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano), he met fellow aspiring screenwriter Piero De Bernardi, and they initiated a long-term partnership that would see them penning more than 120 films together. Having established their reputation as a team working together on Alberto Lattuada’s Guendolina (1957), which earned them their first Nastro d’argento, they went on to write the screenplays for, among others, Zurlini’s La ragazza con la valigia (The Girl with a Suitcase, 1961), Vittorio De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), and Alessandro Blasetti’s Io io io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966) before also collaborating with Alberto Sordi on his Finchè c’è guerra c’è speranza (While There’s War There’s Hope, 1974). Always together, they scripted the first film featuring the hapless tragicomic character Fantozzi in Luciano Salce’s Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) as well as Mario Monicelli’s truculent but now legendary buddy film Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), which brought them two more Nastro d’argento awards. In 1997, they won their first David di Donatello with their screenplay for Dino Risi’s La stanza del vescovo (The Bishop’s Room). In the early 1980s, while continuing their collaboration with Monicelli on Il marchese del Grillo (The Marquis Del Grillo, 1981) and Amici miei—Atto II (All My Friends Part 2, 1982) they also began working regularly with the emerging young comic director Carlo Verdone, with whom they would write seven films, including Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful, 1980), Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Green, 1981), and Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I, 1987), the latter bringing them another shared David di Donatello. It was during this period that they made one of their rare excursions away from comedy when they collaborated with veteran director Sergio Leone on the screenplay of the epic gangster saga C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984). In the 1990s, they continued their partnership, writing several more of the Fantozzi films, adapting Marcella D’Orta’s book for Lina Wertmüller’s Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore, 1992), and working with Monicelli again on Cari fottuttissimi amici (Dear Goddamned Friends, 1994) and

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the popular television miniseries Come quando fuori piove (Hens, Ducks, Chicken and Swine, 2000). Benvenuti’s last work, still together with De Bernardi, was on the directorial debut of popular television satirist Piero Chiambretti, titled Ogni lasciato è perso (Every Dumped Boyfriend Is Lost, 2001). BENVENUTI, PAOLO (1946–). Painter, screenwriter, and director. One of Italy’s most resolutely independent filmmakers, Benvenuti initially trained as a painter at the Florence Art Institute, but a strong sense of social commitment soon led him to exchange his paintbrushes for a film camera. Beginning in 1968, he made a number of short films and documentaries before working as a voluntary assistant for Roberto Rossellini on L’età dei Medici (The Age of the Medici, 1972). After also assisting Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet on Moses und Aaron (Aaron and Moses, 1974), he produced several more documentaries before directing his first full-length feature, Il bacio di Giuda (The Kiss of Judas, 1988), a radical reexamination of the relationship between Judas and Christ, which was warmly received when screened in the International Critics Week at the Venice Festival but also came to be caught up in the controversy surrounding Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, screened out of competition there that same year. There followed three rigorously researched historical features, Confortorio (1992), revolving around the official execution by the Catholic authorities of two young Jewish men in Rome in 1736; Tiburzi (1996), an inquiry into the capture and killing of the Tuscan bandit Domenico Tiburzi in 1896; and Gostanza da Libbiano (Gostanza of Libbiano, 2000), a meticulous re-creation (in black and white) of the trial of a woman accused of being a witch in San Miniato in 1594. Strongly praised and favorably compared with Carl Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), Gostanza was nominated for the Golden Leopard at the Festival of Locarno but in the event received the Special Jury Prize. Benvenuti’s following Segreti di stato (Secret File, 2003) was the result of a thorough reexamination of all the disparate evidence regarding the violent incident at Portella della Ginestra in Sicily on May Day 1951, in which 11 Communists were shot dead and dozens wounded, allegedly by the band of the legendary brigand Salvatore Giuliano. The film, unveiling a network of hitherto unacknowledged complicities, was widely praised for its investigative rigor and civic courage and was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice. Similarly founded on exhaustive historical research and codirected with his wife, Paola Baroni, Benvenuti’s next feature, Puccini e la fanciulla (Puccini and the Girl, 2009), audaciously dispensed with spoken dialogue altogether in order to create the impression of a silent film made at the beginning of the 20th century. The depth of Benvenu-

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ti’s historical research also allowed the film to propose a solution to a mystery that had long puzzled Puccini scholars: Who was Puccini’s muse at the time of the composition of La fanciulla del West? Drawn by his abiding interest in painting and the visual arts, Benvenuti subsequently returned to work on a decade-long planned film on Caravaggio that, to date, has not ensued. As something of a preview, however, in 2012 he produced Il volto del santo (The Saint’s Face), an 18-minute documentary scrutinizing the first moves of artist Luca Battini as he sets out to paint a huge fresco narrating the life of the patron saint of Pisa. BERTINI, FRANCESCA (1892–1985). Actress. One of the greatest divas of the Italian silent cinema, Bertini, born Elena Seracini Vitiello, served a brief apprenticeship on the Neapolitan stage before being recruited by the Film d’Arte Italiana in 1910 to appear in a number of film adaptations of the classical repertoire, including playing Cordelia in an early production of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1910). Two years later, she moved to the Cines and its affiliated Celio Film company, where she distinguished herself in a handful of films, mostly light comedies and melodramas, playing opposite leading men Alberto Collo and Emilio Ghione. Her first steps to stardom, however, appear to have been taken with her delicate and moving performance as Pierrot in the highly acclaimed pantomime Histoire d’un Pierrot (Pierrot, the Prodigal, 1914), directed by Baldassare Negroni and featuring Emilio Ghione as Pochenet and another future diva, Leda Gys, as Louisette. Although her acting style in emotionally charged melodramas such as Sangue Bleu (Blue Blood, 1914), Odette (1915), and La signora delle camelie (The Lady with the Camellias, 1915) could be excessively gestural and highly rhetorical, Bertini undoubtedly had a wider acting range than Lyda Borelli, with whom she was often compared, and some of her most acclaimed performances were in the more naturalistic style. She received special praise for her nuanced and realistic portrayal of the poor laundress in Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina (1915), a film that later would be widely regarded, both for its acting and its mise-en-scène, as a forerunner of Neorealism. Having achieved an extraordinary national and international renown for her physical beauty, her acting, and her glamorous lifestyle, in 1918 she was able to form her own production company, Bertini Film, for which she produced and starred in a number of films, including Mariute (1918), a film that cleverly integrated a reflection on the life and role of the diva herself into its plot. However, a series of seven films on each of the capital sins, I sette peccati, made over two years but released all together in 1919 in order to achieve a greater impact, received a very poor critical and box office response and thus appeared to signal the beginning of a decline. In that same year, Bertini and her company joined the Unione Cinematografica Italiana

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(Italian Cinematographic Union) but were caught up in the ever-deepening crisis that was engulfing the Italian film industry at this time, a crisis to which, ironically, the astronomical salaries paid to divas like Bertini were contributing in no small measure. In 1921, revoking a million-dollar contract that she had signed with Fox to make films in Hollywood, Bertini married Swiss count Paul Cartier and retired from the cinema altogether, except for a brief but unsuccessful attempt at a comeback in Paris in the late 1920s. In 1938, she published a set of memoirs, which liberally mixed truth and fancy, and in the postwar period, she appeared sporadically in a number of very small supporting roles, the last and most significant, perhaps, being the part of a nun, Sister Desolata, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1900, 1976). At the same time, she published a second version of her autobiography, Il resto non conta (The Rest Doesn’t Matter), in 1973. Before dying, however, she was once again able to recount her remarkable experiences as a silent film goddess in Gianfranco Mingozzi’s celebratory television documentary L’ultima diva: Francesca Bertini (The Last Diva, 1982).

Francesca Bertini starring in Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina (1915). Courtesy of Photofest.

BERTOLUCCI, BERNARDO (1941–2018). Poet, screenwriter, and director. Son of the renowned Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo was born into a cultured middle-class family and initially appeared destined to follow

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in his father’s artistic footsteps and become a poet. From early on, however, he also developed a passion for the cinema and at 16 had already made several amateur short films. In 1959, while on a visit to Paris, he became acquainted with the emerging directors of the French New Wave and was particularly struck by the work of Jean-Luc Godard. After returning to Italy and still only 20, he abandoned literary studies at the university in order to work as assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini on Pasolini’s first attempt at filmmaking, Accattone (Accattone!, 1961). The film proved to be a formative experience for both of them, and so, despite winning the prestigious Viareggio Prize with his first published collection of poems that year, Bertolucci turned his back on a literary career and seized the opportunity he was offered to direct his own first film, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962). Demonstrating an already impressive command of film language and technique, Bertolucci’s debut feature also patently betrayed the strong influence of both Pasolini and Godard, who consequently featured as the two “fathers” whom he would eventually feel forced to exorcise in order to affirm his own artistic autonomy. Two years later, he began to find his own style with Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964). Although the film still bore strong traces of the influence of Godard and the French New Wave, the conflict at the core of the film between the comfortable bourgeois existence of its young middle-class protagonist and his felt need to engage in revolutionary politics introduced those autobiographical and political elements that would characterize the films of Bertolucci’s early period. However, despite being praised at Cannes, where it won the special Young Critics Prize, the film fared very poorly with Italian audiences, leading the young cinephile to abandon the big screen for a period in order to make commercial documentaries for the national broadcaster, RAI. After also working on the screenplay of Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968), Bertolucci returned to feature filmmaking with Partner (1968), an unsettling film loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double and strongly influenced by both Godard and the radical ideas of the New York Living Theater. The film’s intentionally anticommercial style ensured its lack of popular appeal, but both Bertolucci’s style and fortunes would change dramatically with his next feature, La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970). Financed by RAI television, the film was conceptually difficult and openly displayed Bertolucci’s now obsessive interest in psychoanalysis, but it was visually and aurally stunning. Shown twice on national television in a single week, it had already attracted an audience of millions of viewers by the time it was presented to great critical acclaim at the Venice Festival that year. La strategia thus marked a crucial turn in Bertolucci’s filmmaking, away from a cinema of ideas that spoke only to a small elite and toward quality films that would appeal to a mass audience. This new direction was con-

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firmed that same year by what is still widely regarded as his most artistically accomplished film, Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970). Adapting a novel by Alberto Moravia set during the Fascist period, the film ably mixed politics, psychoanalysis, and cinephilia in a consummate exercise of virtuosic filmmaking. The Conformist’s enormous critical and commercial success, however, was far surpassed two years later by the film that consecrated his international reputation, Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972). Starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in a profound study of existential alienation and sexual politics, the film won international acclaim and a host of awards, including two Oscar nominations. In Italy, however, the film quickly became embroiled in a long series of censorship battles that kept it in the courts and officially banned from Italian screens for more than a decade. In the wake of the enormous international success of Last Tango, Bertolucci was easily able to attract financing from three of the major American studios for his monumental five-and-a-half-hour historical epic Novecento (1900, 1976). Nevertheless, despite its wide historical sweep and its extraordinary visual lyricism, the film was criticized from many quarters for both its up-front but ambivalent left-wing politics and its romantic approach to Italian history. It also suffered, especially in the United States, from circulating in a confusing variety of much-shortened versions. Bertolucci thus returned to relatively smaller-scale filmmaking with La luna (Luna, 1979), in which he emphatically brought together two of his major interests, opera and psychoanalysis, but the film was greeted with only a tepid critical response. Two years later, La tragedia d’un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981), a courageous attempt to explore the issue of political terrorism still rife in Italy at the time, was also generally dismissed. After collaborating with a number of other directors on a documentary on the death of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer in 1984, Bertolucci directed L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987), the first of the English-language megaproductions that would characterize his mature period. The most successful film of his entire career, The Last Emperor attracted a legion of national and international awards, including nine David di Donatello awards, the César for Best Foreign Film, four Golden Globes, and nine Oscars, thus elevating Bertolucci to a world superstar status unmatched by any postwar Italian director, with the possible exception of Federico Fellini. However, while he continued, with the help of his regular cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to produce films of extraordinary visual beauty, none of his subsequent works received the same attention or acclaim. The Sheltering Sky (1990), adapted from a novel by American writer Paul Bowles, was ironically more appreciated in Italy than in the United States, and Little Buddha (1993) received some critical praise but did poorly at the box office. For all its warmth and color, Stealing Beauty (1996) failed to impress, and Besieged (1998), the story of a relationship that develops in an

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apartment in Rome between a white American musician and a black African housekeeper, was also widely dismissed, when not attacked as implicitly racist. A warmer critical reception greeted Bertolucci’s nostalgic celebration of sex, politics, and cinephilia in Paris in the 1960s in The Dreamers (2003), though perhaps not quite enough to fully restore him to the rank of Italy’s greatest international director, a position that he managed to occupy for a large part of his extraordinary career.

Bernardo Bertolucci directing Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (1972). Courtesy of Photofest.

Indeed, soon after the release of The Dreamers, a series of progressively more unsuccessful operations to relieve back pain resulted in his permanent confinement to a wheel-chair, making him despair of ever being able to make another film. Nevertheless, and after being awarded a Golden Lion for career achievement at Venice in 2007, he did manage to direct Io e te (You and Me, 2012), adapted from a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti. In a moving ceremony two years later, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Parma. At the ceremony, he screened Scarpette Rosse (The Red Shoes, 2013) a two-minute film he had made (and previously screened at the Venice Festival) in order to highlight the plight of the disabled in moving around Rome in a wheelchair.

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BERTOLUCCI, GIUSEPPE (1947–2012). Director and screenwriter. Younger brother of more famous writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe began his career in cinema as assistant to his brother on La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970), in which he also appeared in a small part. After a number of shorts and documentaries made for television, he directed his first feature film, Berlinguer, ti voglio bene (Berlinguer, I Love You, 1977), adapting a comic stage show he had written for then cabaret artist and future actor-director Roberto Benigni. This was followed by two films dealing with much more serious themes and interestingly utilizing a largely female perspective, Oggetti smarriti (Lost and Found, 1980) and Segreti segreti (Secrets Secrets, 1984), the latter being one of the few films to openly confront the issue of political terrorism at the time. Tutto Benigni (All Benigni, made in 1983, released 1986), essentially an attempt to record some of Benigni’s liveliest stage performances for a wider audience, was followed by Strana la vita (The Strangeness of Life, 1987) and the quirky, fragmented comedy I cammelli (The Camels, 1988), which featured the popular stand-up cabaret comedians Paolo Rossi and Diego Abatantuono in the lead roles. Amori in corso (Love in Progress, 1988), set almost completely in a country house in Bertolucci’s native Emilia region and played out between two young women who await the arrival of a male lover, is generally regarded as Bertolucci’s most accomplished film. He subsequently directed more shorts and documentaries for television and three other feature films: Troppo sole (Too Much Sun, 1993), a satire on celebrity and modern mass-media society in which impersonator Sabina Guzzanti plays more than a dozen different roles; Il dolce rumore della vita (The Sweet Sounds of Life, 1999); and L’amore probabilmente (Probably Love, 2000), the last made exclusively with digital video. For the next decade, he served as director of the Bologna Cinémathèque during which time he produced a number of documentaries, most notably his Pasolini prossimo nostro (Pasolini Our Close Neighbour), a study of Pasolini’s final film, Salò, presented at the Venice Festival in 2006. BETTI, LAURA (1927–2004). Singer and actress. Betti began performing, under the name of Laura Sarno as a jazz singer in musical revues but soon graduated to more demanding roles in dramatic theater, giving a particularly strong performance in an Italian production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1956. In the early 1960s, she appeared on radio and television and performed in a series of solo recitals (Giro a vuoto) in which she sang texts written by established writers such as Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini and set to music composed by Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni. After small parts in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night, 1960), she appeared ever more frequently, and in more substantial roles, in the films of Pasolini, eventually winning the Coppa Volpi for her role as Emilia, the enigmatic and

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saintly servant girl in Teorema (Theorem, 1968). She would later incarnate the much more cheerful character of the Wife of Bath in Pasolini’s adaptation of The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1972). Never averse to interpreting hard and often unsympathetic women, she played Fulvia’s reactionary sister, Esther, in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfan (1973) and the cruel pro-Fascist Regina in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1900, 1976). Fiercely devoted to Pasolini and to celebrating his memory, she was instrumental in setting up the Pasolini Foundation and, in 2001, produced and directed the acclaimed 90-minute documentary Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno (Pasolini and the Raison d’être of a Dream). BIANCO E NERO. Film journal. Official organ of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Bianco e nero began monthly publication in January 1937, edited by the Centro’s founding director, Luigi Chiarini, and Umberto Barbaro. The journal quickly presented its scholarly credentials by publishing not only the editors’ own pedagogical essays and film reviews but also informed discussions of theoretical works such as Roger Spottiswoode’s A Grammar of Film and Ricciotto Canudo’s L’usine aux images. With its reputation well established, the journal was nevertheless forced to cease publication between 1944 and 1946 because of the war but resumed with the reopening of the Centro in 1947. In 1999, following legislation that changed the Centro’s status from a state body to an autonomous foundation, the journal also changed its name to Bianco & Nero and became a bimonthly with a double summer edition. In December 2003, under the editorship of Leonardo Quaresima, it was given a new look to initiate its third series. Having celebrated its 80th year in 2017, though now as the quarterly Bianco e nero, it remains the oldest and most prestigious film publication in Italy. BIGAZZI, LUCA (1958–). Cinematographer. One of the most prolific and most respected of the new generation of cinematographers to emerge in Italy in the last 40 years, Bigazzi worked on television commercials before making his debut as director of photography on Silvio Soldini’s Paesaggio con figure (Landscape with Figures, 1983). In the years that followed, he photographed practically all of Soldini’s subsequent films, including the extremely successful Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips, 2000), as well as collaborating with most of the (then) young directors of the New Italian Cinema, in particular with Mario Martone on Morte d’un matematico napolitano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, 1992) and L’amore molesto (Nasty Love, 1995), with Michele Placido on Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero, 1995) and Un viaggio chiamato amore (A Journey Called Love, 2002), and

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with the iconoclastic duo Daniele Ciprí and Franco Maresco on Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn, 1995) and the controversial Totò che visse due volte (Toto Who Lived Twice, 1998). Perhaps his most impressive work during this early period was the cinematography for Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (America, 1993), its quality recognized by the award of both a Nastro d’argento and a David di Donatello. The new millennium has seen him become ever more prolific, working on more than 60 films in 20 years. While continuing to collaborate with established directors such as Soldini, Placido, and Amelio on practically all their subsequent films, Bigazzi has also contributed his award-winning cinematography to the films of a number of emerging young directors such as Marco Amenta, Andrea Molaioli, and Andrea Segre. However, his extraordinary talents as a cinematographer have undoubtedly been most brilliantly showcased in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, all of which he has photographed and each of which have brought him a host of awards, among them both the David and the Nastro d’argento for Cinematography for Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004), This Must Be the Place (2011), and La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), while more recently his work on Sorrentino’s 10-episode television series, The Young Pope (2016–2017), has earned him a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited Series or Movie. With more than 100 films and television series already to his credit, and almost as many awards, there is no doubt that Bigazzi has achieved the status of doyen of Italian cinematographers. BINI, ALFREDO (1926–2010). Producer. After dabbling in journalism and theatrical management in the 1950s, Bini began his career as a film producer in 1960, founding Arco Film to make Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960). A year later, in addition to financing Bolognini’s subsequent La viaccia (The Lovemakers, 1961) and Ugo Gregoretti’s first film, I nuovi angeli (The New Angels, 1961), he also shouldered production of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first feature, Accattone (Accattone!, 1961), when Federico Fellini, who had originally agreed to produce the film, decided to withdraw from the project. Bini subsequently produced all of Pasolini’s films up to and including Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), for which he received his second Nastro d’argento for Best Producer. Although quite a canny producer, as demonstrated by his strong support for Pasolini through all the censorship battles that Pasolini’s films inevitably provoked, Bini was also prone to faux pas. In the late 1960s, having secured the film rights to Petronius’s Satyricon and learning that Fellini was also about to adapt it to film, Bini took Fellini to court and won the case. He then hired Gian Luigi Polidoro to direct the film. Fellini nevertheless proceeded to make his version, skirting past the legal injunction simply by changing the title to “Fellini Satyricon.” Bini managed

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to release his film before Fellini had finished his own, but the Polidoro version flopped at the box office while Fellini’s went on to make a decent return. Apart from an interesting documentary on the Kennedy assassinations, I due Kennedy (The Two Kennedys, 1969), directed by TV historian Gianni Bisiach, Bini’s subsequent handful of films were never able to rise above the level of sexploitation, and by the early 1980s he had retired from filmmaking altogether. In the late 1980s, he served a three-year term as general delegate of the Milan Fair’s film market, MIFED, and succeeded in modernizing some of its marketing strategies. Between 1994 and 1995, he also served as interim director of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. BLASETTI, ALESSANDRO (1900–1987). Critic, screenwriter, and director. Sometimes affectionately styled “the father of Italian cinema” in recognition of the fundamental role he played in the rebirth of Italy’s film industry in the late 1920s, Blasetti graduated from university with a degree in law but subsequently chose to work as a journalist and film critic. In 1925, at a time when the formerly flourishing Italian film industry had declined to its lowest historical ebb, Blasetti initiated a regular film column in the Roman daily L’Impero. He soon also founded several dedicated film magazines, beginning with Lo Schermo (which would later become Cinematografo), in which he carried out a passionate campaign to revive national film production. In 1928, together with fellow film enthusiasts Aldo Vergano, Umberto Barbaro, and Goffredo Alessandrini, he founded the Augustus company in order to produce his first feature, Sole (Sun, 1929), a powerful portrayal of harsh peasant life in the Pontine marshes that displayed the distinctive influence of the new Soviet cinema. Following the film’s critical success, Stefano Pittaluga, the only film producer still working in Italy at the time, invited Blasetti to join him at the newly restored Cines studios, which Pittaluga had equipped for sound. Blasetti accepted and, in 1930, made Resurrectio, although, for a number of reasons that have remained unclear, the film was not released until a year later, by which time Gennaro Righelli’s La canzone dell’amore (Song of Love, 1930) had already crossed the line to become the first Italian sound film. Again at the urging of Pittaluga, Blasetti then directed Nerone (Nero, 1931), essentially a recording of one of the most famous current stage revues of the celebrated stage comedian Ettore Petrolini. This modest, if historically valuable, exercise in filmed theater was followed by a return to the more marked style and rural themes of Blasetti’s first film in Terra madre (Earth Mother, 1932). In the wake of Pittaluga’s untimely death in 1931 and with Emilio Cecchi as the new artistic director at Cines, Blasetti produced a documentary on Assisi and a much-admired adaptation of Cesare Viviani’s Neapolitan stage

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comedy La tavola dei poveri (The Table of the Poor, 1932) before directing what is generally regarded as his finest film of the interwar years, 1860 (Gesuzza, the Garibaldian Wife, 1933). An epic re-creation of Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily and his military triumph at Calatafimi, the film employed largely nonprofessional actors and a realistic style that would later lead many to see it as an early forerunner of postwar Neorealism. Motivated by an idealistic faith in Fascism, which he abandoned after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia two years later, Blasetti then made his only openly Fascist film, Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1935). Painting a heroic portrait of the historic march on Rome in 1922, the film also provided a measure of moral justification for the violent methods the Fascist gangs had used in those early years. Ironically, however, Blasetti’s film found very little favor with the party hierarchy, which at the time was concerned with projecting a much more respectable image of itself. Disappointed and frustrated, Blasetti turned to making more commercially viable films, beginning with the navy melodrama Aldebaran (1935), followed by the film that Blasetti himself would describe as his only white telephone film, La contessa di Parma (The Duchess of Parma, 1937). Then, after two elegant and feisty historical costume dramas, Ettore Fieramosca (1938) and Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvator Rosa, 1939), Blasetti produced the extraordinary La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941). An odd blend of fairy tale, historical fantasy, action adventure, and romantic melodrama, the film won the Mussolini Prize at the Venice Festival that year despite its openly antimilitaristic and antiwar sentiments. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels, who was present at the screening, is said to have remarked that if a German director had made such a film he would have been immediately executed. Unperturbed, Blasetti had already gone on to make another historical costume drama, La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1942), an adaptation of a dramatic poem about a family feud in Renaissance Florence that became famous, above all, for a scene in which Clara Calamai appeared, momentarily, bare breasted. Blasetti then returned to a contemporary setting in Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942), the charming story of a day in the life of a traveling salesman. The film, on the basis of its representation of everyday life and its adoption of a realist style, would later be numbered among the immediate forerunners of Neorealism. In the immediate postwar period, Blasetti was able to square accounts with his earlier involvement with Fascism by paying homage to the Resistance movement in Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946). He then went on, always with consummate professional competence, to direct an extraordinary variety of films, ranging from the big-budget Roman-Christian swordand-sandal epic Fabiola (1949) to Prima comunione (Father’s Dilemma, 1950), a modest but well-crafted Neorealist comedy about a father trying to

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find a suitable dress for his daughter’s first communion ceremony. After playing himself as the established director working at Cinecittà in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), Blasetti also initiated the vogue for the multiple-episode film with Altri tempi (Times Gone By, 1952) and Tempi nostri (The Anatomy of Love, 1954), the biting social comedy in many of the episodes prefiguring the coming trends of the commedia all’italiana. Then, demonstrating his habitual professional acumen, he brought Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni together in Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954) and La fortuna di essere donna (What a Woman, 1956), two slightly scurrilous but lively comedies that highlighted the considerable acting talents of both future stars. In 1959, with Europa di notte (Europe by Night, 1959), Blasetti also delineated the form of the exotic pseudodocumentary that would soon be taken up in the mondo films of Gualtiero Jacopetti and others. From the late 1960s, however, having provided his own trenchant critique of the newly affluent Italian society in Io, io, io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966), he began to move away from the big screen in order to work mostly for television, where he came to be best known for his nine-episode series Racconti di fantascienza di Blasetti (Science Fiction Stories by Blasetti, 1978–1979). BOLOGNINI, MAURO (1922–2001). Screenwriter and director. A filmmaker whose best works were characterized by a propensity for visual elegance and literary themes, Bolognini studied architecture and design in Florence before moving to Rome, where he spent a year at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After a short period in France working with Jean Delannoy and Yves Allégret, he returned to Italy and served as assistant to Luigi Zampa before making his directorial debut with the musical melodrama Ci troviamo in galleria (We'll Meet in the Gallery, 1953), a film that provided Sophia Loren with one of her first significant roles. This was followed by Gli innamorati (Wild Love, 1956), a tangle of love stories set in the lower-class quarters of Rome, and several social comedies, among them Giovani mariti (Young Husbands, 1958) and Arrangiatevi (You’re on Your Own, 1959), one of the many films featuring the popular comic actor Totò. By this time, Bolognini had also initiated a close collaboration with Pier Paolo Pasolini, who would help write the screenplays of five of Bolognini’s subsequent films, including La notte brava (The Big Night, 1959), La giornata balorda (From a Roman Balcony, 1960), and Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960), the first of what would become a long series of fine literary adaptations and Bolognini’s first real critical and box office success. With Pasolini moving on to direct his own films in 1961, Bolognini turned to other writers for inspiration and adapted Vasco Pratolini’s turn-of-the-centu-

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ry novel into the film La viaccia (The Lovemakers, 1961); the film somewhat divided the critics but was nevertheless nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. Many of the feature films that followed, in between shorter sketches produced for compilation films such as La donna è una cosa meravigliosa (Woman Is a Wonderful Thing, 1964), I tre volti (The Three Faces, 1965), Le fate (The Queens, 1966), Le streghe (The Witches, 1967), and Capriccio all’italiana (Caprice Italian Style, 1968), were also literary adaptations: Senilità (Careless, 1962), Agostino (1962), Madamigella di Maupin (1965), and Un bellissimo novembre (That Splendid November, 1968), with Bolognini turning to Vasco Pratolini again in 1969 for what became his most critically acclaimed film, Metello (1970). The story of a young, handsome workingclass hero set in a meticulously re-created late 19th-century Florence, the film was showered with prizes, among them three David di Donatello and two Nastro d’argento awards and two nominations for the Palme d’or. Bolognini’s production during the 1970s was marked by a greater variety and included Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente (Chronicle of a Homicide, 1972), a film that attempted to reflect the social and political chaos in Italy at the time, and an unusual foray into the horror film genre with the macabre Gran bollito (Black Journal, 1979). He returned to literary adaptations in the 1980s with an explicitly erotic version of Alexandre Dumas’s novel in La storia vera della signora delle camelie (Lady of the Camelias, 1981) and a similarly erotically charged adaptation of the anonymous 16thcentury comedy La Venexiana (The Venetian Woman, 1986). Having at times received a greater appreciation abroad than in Italy itself, Bolognini’s body of work was officially recognized in 1999 when he was awarded an honorary David di Donatello for his whole career. BONNARD, MARIO (1889–1965). Actor, screenwriter, and director. One of the leading male actors of the Italian silent period, Bonnard joined Ambrosio Film in 1911. After a number of light roles that showcased his cultivated and refined looks, he took on the more difficult role of Satan in Ambrosio’s much-acclaimed quadriptych of evil, Satana (Satan, 1912), a film that anticipated, and in all probability influenced, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1914). His most renowned performance during this period, however, was in the role of the elegant but sickly young nobleman in Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), the film that launched Lyda Borelli as the first diva of the Italian silver screen and Bonnard with her as the leading male star. Like many actors during this period, Bonnard soon graduated to directing, beginning in 1917 with L’altro io (The Other Me), a loose adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He continued to both act and direct in the 1920s, producing, among others, a creditable two-part adaptation of Manzoni’s classic historical novel I pro-

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messi sposi (The Betrothed, 1922) before working for a period in France and Germany, where he directed several Bergfilme (mountain films). One of the first sound films he made upon returning to Italy was Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932), the film in which both the De Filippo brothers and starlet-to-be Assia Noris made their big-screen debuts. Of the other films he directed in subsequent years, the ones most remembered are the two popular working-class melodramas Avanti c’è posto (Before the Postman, 1942), notable, in part, for the collaboration of Cesare Zavattini and Federico Fellini on the script and as Aldo Fabrizi’s first time on the screen, and Campo de’ Fiori (Peddler and the Lady, 1943), which provided Anna Magnani with one of her first significant film roles. Bonnard’s foray into the peplum genre at the end of his career, a remake of the classic Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959), was competent enough as a genre film but is remembered mostly for having been completed by the young Sergio Leone. BORELLI, LYDA (1884–1959). Actress. The most renowned of all the Italian divas of the silent period, Borelli was already one of the most famous theatrical actresses of her day, acclaimed above all for her intense portrayals of the femmes fatales in the plays of Gabriele D’Annunzio (and Oscar Wilde’s Salome) before coming to the silver screen in 1913. However, her appearance that year in Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), a highly charged romantic melodrama directed by Mario Caserini for Gloria Films, immediately launched her to superstardom. Her highly stylized and expressionistic form of acting, which was characterized by exaggerated physical movements and dramatic poses and gestures, led to the creation of the neologism borelleggiare, meaning “to act in the style of Borelli,” although not always used as a term of praise. Thanks to a remarkable ability to use her body to mime the torment of a soul in the throes of overwhelming passions, Borelli was able to command astronomical fees for her appearance in films such as La donna nuda (The Naked Truth, 1914), Rapsodia satanica (Satan’s Rhapsody, 1915), Fior di male (Flower of Evil, 1915), Malombra (1917), Carnevalesca (Carnivalesque, 1918), and the 10-minute intermezzo La leggenda di Santa Barbara (The Legend of Saint Barbara, 1918). However, after having scaled the Olympian heights of stardom and becoming a screen legend despite appearing in no more than a dozen films, Borelli brought it all to an abrupt end in 1918 by marrying a Ferrarese nobleman, Count Vittorio Cini, and retiring from the cinema, never to return.

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BOSÈ, LUCIA (1931–2020). Actress. Lucia Bosè, born Lucia Borlani, was first noticed as a potential actress by Luchino Visconti but only began her career in films after winning the Miss Italia title in 1947, playing a young peasant girl in Giuseppe De Santis’s Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950). Cast more appropriately, she was able to give much more convincing performances in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca d’un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950) and La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953), as well as in two charming comedies directed by Luciano Emmer, Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris Is Always Paris, 1951) and Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952). Much in demand, she reached an early peak in her career in 1955 when she appeared in Francesco Maselli’s Gli sbandati (Abandoned, 1955), and Juan Antonio Bardem’s La muerte de un ciclista (The Death of a Cyclist, 1955), on the set of which she met the flamboyant Spanish bullfighter Luis Dominguín. A year later, having married Dominguín, she announced her retirement from the cinema. She returned to the silver screen in the late 1960s in a number of Spanish films, beginning with Nocturno 29 (Nocturne 29, 1968), directed by Catalan director Pere Portabella, and in Italy where she appeared in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Sotto il segno dello scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio, 1969), Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969), and Mauro Bolognini’s Metello (1970). She also appeared in a number of French films, notably as the enigmatic mother figure in Marguerite Duras’s Nathalie Granger (1972). After playing Donna Violanta in Daniel Schmid’s Violanta (1978), she again retired from the screen until the late 1980s, when she returned to play the mother in Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987) and Dona Elvira in Tonino Cervi’s Molière adaptation, L’avaro (The Miser, 1990). After appearing in the television miniseries Alta società (Surviving at the Top, 1994), she rather appropriately played the role of Old Safiye in Ferzan Ozpetek’s exotic tale Harem suaré (1999). In the new millennium she made very few films although she did play the daunting Donna Ferdinanda in Roberto Faenza’s I viceré (The Viceroys, 2007) before appearing in her last role as an 80-year-old actress returning to her native town in Chile in order to honor her father’s memory in the Chilean–Italian coproduction, One More Time (2013), directed by Pablo Benedetti and Davide Sordella. Only a few months before passing away from COVID-19 in 2020, she had reappeared to great acclaim on Italian national television in the popular talk-show, Domenica in, recounting her eventful life and launching the recently published biography Lucia Bosè: una biografia by film historian Roberto Liberatori.

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BOZZETTO, BRUNO (1938–). Director, cartoonist, and animator. Widely regarded as Italy’s leading animator, in 1958 Bozzetto created his first 13minute animated short film, Tapum! La storia delle armi (Tapum! The History of Weapons, 1958) by hand in his own home. Following the critical acclaim the film received, Bozzetto was able to access better facilities in order to produce La storia delle invenzioni (Man and His World, 1959) and soon to establish his own company, Bruno Bozzetto Film. With Un Oscar per il Signor Rossi (An Award for Mr. Rossi, 1960), Bozzetto brought to the screen the distinctive little man with the red hat who would become the Bozzetto trademark and who would subsequently reappear in many short films such as Il Signor Rossi compra l’automobile (Mr. Rossi Buys a Car, 1967), Il Signor Rossi al camping (Mr. Rossi Goes Camping, 1970), and the full-length feature I sogni del Signor Rossi (Mr. Rossi Dreams, 1977). In 1976, together with actor-animator Maurizio Nichetti, Bozzetto made Allegro non troppo (1976), which mixed live action and animation to illustrate six pieces of classical music in something of a spoof of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Sotto il ristorante cinese (Under the Chinese Restaurant, 1987) also mixed live action and animation in a charming modern fable partly based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Having already collected numerous prizes and awards, Bozzetto received the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin Film Festival for Mistertao (Mr. Tao, 1989) and, a year later, an Oscar nomination for Cavallette (Grasshoppers, 1990). In the following years, he produced, among other things, an acclaimed animated short for Hanna-Barbera, HELP? (1995), and in 1996, in coproduction with RAI television and with the support of Cartoon, the Media Program of the European Union, he created the 26-episode cartoon serial The Spaghetti Family. One of Bozzetto’s most amusing subsequent creations was the two-dimensional computer animation Europe & Italy (1999), which graphically illustrated how Italian social habits differed from the European norm. Among Bozzetto’s many more recent delightful creations is his own animated website: www.bozzetto.com. BRAGAGLIA, ANTON GIULIO (1890–1960). Photographer, journalist, writer, and film and theater director. Elder brother of photographer and director Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Anton Giulio began working as a journalist in Rome in 1906 when his father, Francesco, was managing director at the Cines. An active interest in all the arts led to his involvement with the Futurist movement, and he produced two interesting experimental films, Thais (1917) and Perfido incanto (Wicked Enchantment, 1918) before turning to the theater; in 1922, together with his brother, he founded the Teatro degli Indipendenti. After touring America with his theatrical troupe in the late 1920s, he returned to Italy and directed Vele ammainate (Lowered Sails,

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1931) at the new Cines-Pittaluga studios. Following the film’s singular lack of success, Anton Giulio abandoned the cinema altogether and henceforth dedicated himself to writing and the theater. BRAGAGLIA, CARLO LUDOVICO (1894–1998). Photographer, screenwriter, and theater and film director. Son of the first managing director of the Cines, Francesco Bragaglia, and younger brother of writer and director Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia nurtured a passion for photography from a very young age. In 1922, together with brother Anton Giulio, he founded the experimental theater company Il Teatro degli Indipendenti. With the coming of sound, he began working at the Cines, first as set photographer and then as film editor. He then served as assistant director to his brother, Anton Giulio, on Vele ammainate (Lowered Sails, 1931) before directing his first solo film, O la borsa o la vita (1932), a surrealistic comedy adapted from a popular radio play. After another handful of undistinguished comedies, he made Animali pazzi (Mad Animals, 1939), the second of what would become literally 100 films to star master comic actor Totò. He subsequently directed the popular stage duo Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo in Casanova farebbe così! (After Casanova’s Fashion, 1942) and Non ti pago! (I’m Not Paying!, 1942) and made another series of comedies featuring Totò, including the extremely popular Totò le mokò (1949) and Le sei mogli di Barbablù (Bluebeard’s Six Wives, 1950). In the early 1960s, before retiring from the cinema altogether, he also directed a number of colorful sword-andsandal epics that included Annibale (Hannibal, 1959), Gli amori di Ercole (The Loves of Hercules, 1960), and Ursus nella valle dei Leoni (Valley of the Lions, 1961). BRANCATI, VITALIANO (1907–1954). Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Although better known for his novels and plays, Brancati also worked in the film industry as a screenwriter during the last decade of his life, beginning with his collaboration on the screenplay of Luigi Chiarini’s La bella addormentata (Sleeping Beauty, 1942). His involvement with the cinema continued in the postwar period with a series of films that he wrote or cowrote for Luigi Zampa, including Anni difficili (Difficult Years, 1948), which he adapted from one of his own short stories; Anni facili (Easy Years, 1953); and L’arte di arrangiarsi (The Art of Getting Along, 1955). At the same time, he also worked on Mario Monicelli’s Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), Alessandro Blasetti’s Altri tempi (Times Gone By, 1952), and Roberto Rossellini’s Dov’è la libertà . . .? (Where Is Freedom?, 1954). After his premature death in 1954, two of his other novels were also adapted for the screen: Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960), directed by Mauro Bolognini and starring Marcello Mastroianni, and Paolo il caldo (The Sensu-

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ous Sicilian, 1973), directed by Marco Vicario. In 1974, his play La governante (The Governess), which had drawn the ire of the censors in 1952 due to its references to female homosexuality, was also adapted for the screen in a film directed by Giovanni Grimaldi. BRASCHI, NICOLETTA (1960–). Actress. Braschi studied acting at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome before making her film debut in Roberto Benigni’s Tu mi turbi (You Disturb Me, 1983) where, in one of the four episodes, she played the part of the Virgin Mary. She subsequently appeared in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Segreti segreti (Secrets Secrets, 1985) and as Benigni’s love interest in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law (1986). After playing a female demon in Benigni’s Il piccolo diavolo (The Little Devil, 1988) and the Italian tourist stranded in Memphis in the second story of Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), she again appeared as Benigni’s love interest in Johnny Stecchino (Johnny Toothpick, 1991) and indeed married Benigni that year. After a strong supporting role in Roberto Faenza’s Sostiene Pereira (According to Pereira, 1995) and appearing as Pasolini’s niece in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Pasolini, un delitto italiano (Who Killed Pasolini?, 1995), Braschi played the part of Dora, the wife and mother, in Benigni’s Oscar-winning La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997). In the same year, she was awarded the David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actress for her interpretation of Giovanna, the schoolteacher in Paolo Virzì’s coming-ofage film, Ovosodo (Hardboiled Egg, 1997). While continuing her professional partnership with her husband, both acting in and also producing Benigni’s Pinocchio (2002) and La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005), she also distinguished herself playing the lead role in Francesca Comencini’s powerful workplace drama Mi piace lavorare-mobbing (I Like to Work, 2004), for which she received a nomination for the Nastro d’argento. Braschi subsequently chose to work mainly on the stage, where she received much acclaim for her performances in a number of the plays of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. In 2015, together with her husband, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto for her contribution to the performing arts. Braschi returned to the big screen in the role of the exploitative landowner, the Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna, in Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018). BRASS, TINTO (1933–). Actor, screenwriter, and director. Despite what would become his characteristic association with soft-porn films, Tinto (short for Giovanni) Brass began his career as a passionate cinephile, working for a number of years as an archivist at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Returning to Italy in the late 1950s, he served as assistant director to Roberto Rossellini on India: Matra Bhumi (India, 1959) and Il Generale

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Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) before making his directorial debut with the anarchistic social satire Chi lavora è perduto (Who Works Is Lost, 1963), a film much applauded at the Venice Festival but also fiercely attacked by the censors. A similar strong sense of social commitment was evident in Ça ira, il fiume della rivolta (River of Revolt, 1964), a powerful documentation of revolutions throughout the world, edited from stock footage. He returned to truculent social satire in the two episodes he contributed to the compilation film La mia signora (My Wife, 1964), starring Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi, and with the science fiction spoof Il disco volante (The Flying Saucer, 1964). He then experimented with the Spaghetti Western in Yankee (1966) before moving to London to make Col cuore in gola (I Am What I Am, 1967), an erotic thriller adapted from a novel by Sergio Donati that exploited split-screen and animation techniques. The provocative eroticism already present in Brass’s earlier works became more pronounced in his subsequent films Nerosubianco (Attraction, 1969), L’urlo (The Howl, 1970), and Dropout (1970), all made in England and all held up for long periods by the censors demanding cuts. The sexual dimension appeared to move ever more to center stage in Salon Kitty (1976), Caligola (Caligula, 1979), and the films that followed: La chiave (The Key, 1983), adapted from the novel by Junikiro Tanizaki and scored by Ennio Morricone; Snack Bar Budapest (1988); Paprika (Paprika, Life in a Brothel, 1991); L’uomo che guarda (The Voyeur, 1994); and, in the new millennium, Tra(sgre)dire (Cheeky, 2000), Fallo! (Private, 2003), and Monamour (2005), all of which served to locate him very firmly in the area of soft-core pornography. Since 2008, he has mostly appeared in cameo roles in films directed by others. In 2013, his life and work were thoroughly explored and celebrated in Istintobrass, a 90-minute documentary by Massimiliano Zanin in which a host of actors and critics, from Helen Mirren to Franco Nero, all lined up to pay their respects to the director universally recognized as “the master of authorial erotic cinema.” BRAZZI, ROSSANO (1916–1994). Actor and director. A keen sportsman in his youth, Brazzi became interested in theater while studying law at the University of Florence. In 1937, he moved to Rome and began acting professionally in the prestigious company of Emma Grammatica. While making a name for himself onstage, he also began to appear in films, playing his first lead role in Guido Brignone’s Kean (1940) before appearing as Cavaradossi in Carl Koch’s Tosca (1941) and then as the Russian nobleman Leo Kovalenski in Goffredo Alessandrini’s two-part epic Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). After the war, he continued to alternate between the Italian stage and screen before being drawn to Hollywood in the late 1940s to play Professor Bhaer in Mervyn LeRoy’s production of Little Women (1949). His real fame, howev-

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er, came in the next decade when, in films such as Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Countessa (1954), David Lean’s Summertime (1955), and Joshua Logan’s South Pacific (1958), he came to incarnate the Hollywood idea of the suave Latin lover. Indeed, he became so identified with the image of the irresistible Mediterranean playboy that he was featured as himself, being literally mobbed by hundreds of women, in Gualtiero Jacopetti’s “shockumentary” Mondo cane (1962). From the late 1960s, in addition to appearing in a wide variety of films ranging from Spaghetti Westerns like Il giorno del giudizio (Day of Judgment, 1971) to sexy horror thrillers such as Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, 1974), Brazzi was also often seen on both European and American television, making guest appearances in episodes of popular long-running series such as The Survivors (1969), Hawaii Five-0 (1977), Charlie’s Angels (1979), and The Love Boat (1982). At the same time, he also tried his hand at directing, producing a charming children’s fantasy, Il Natale che quasi non fu (The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, 1966); the heist film Sette uomini e un cervello (Criminal Affair, 1968); and, under the pseudonym of Edward Ross, the taut and stylish giallo Salvare la faccia (Psychout for Murder, 1969). His last significant role was playing Marini, the counterespionage chief, in Pasquale Squitieri’s dark Vatican spy thriller Russicum, i giorni del diavolo (The Third Solution, 1988), although his very last appearance on the big screen was in a cameo in Al Festa’s Fotogrammi mortali (Fatal Frames, 1996), a slasher horror film shot in Rome in 1994 but only released two years later, after Brazzi’s death. See also MONDO FILM. BRENTA, MARIO (1942–). Camera operator, screenwriter, director, and teacher. Following a degree in engineering at the Politecnico of Milan, Venetian-born Brenta began working in advertising before moving to the cinema. After serving as assistant to a number of directors, including Luigi Zampa and Eriprando Visconti, he produced a remarkable first film, Vermisat (1974), the portrait of a man so poor and socially marginal that he survives by selling worms to fishermen and eventually his own blood to a medical charlatan. A slow-paced film of austere beauty and profound compassion, it was hailed, especially in France, as an extraordinary first work. In 1982, while continuing to make documentaries and short films for French and Italian television, Brenta joined Ermanno Olmi in setting up the alternative film school Ipotesi Cinema at Bassano del Grappa, where he also subsequently taught. In 1988, he directed his second feature, Maicol, a powerful film that documented the plight of a withdrawn five-year-old child who lives alone with his mother in a relationship of near neglect. The film charted the odyssey of the

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child one night when he is carelessly abandoned on a train by the mother, who is more concerned with tracking down her sometime lover than with looking after her son. A moving but unsentimental study of child neglect and emotional deprivation, the film was all the more powerful in its studied avoidance of moralistic condemnation. Brenta’s third feature, made in 1994, was a stunningly beautiful adaptation of a novel by Dino Buzzati, Barnabo delle montagne (Barnabo of the Mountains), the story of an introverted forest ranger who seeks expiation and solitude among the craggy peaks and eternal silences of the Dolomite Mountains. Between feature films, Brenta continued to make documentaries, among them Effetto Olmi (The Olmi Effect, 1982), a revealing portrait of the filmmaker who most influenced him, and the remarkable Robinson in Laguna (1985), a 25-minute film about a poor peasant farmer who, for 50 years, rows across the Venetian lagoon every morning in order to cultivate a small plot on an island within sight of, but a world away from, from the city that the tourists see. Since 2010, while continuing to teach film at the University of Padua and at Ipotesi Cinema, he has teamed up with Ecuadorian-born Belgian screenwriter and director Karine de Villers to coauthor several other award-winning documentaries, among them Calle de la Pietà (2010), ostensibly an attempt to chronicle the last day on earth of painter Titian, who is struggling to complete a painting of the Pietà even as the plague is taking him away, but which quickly turns into a lyrical meditation on death and memory, as well as Corpo a corpo (Close Combat, 2014), a 90-minute recording of the creative process of gestation of the theatrical piece Orchidee (Orchids), devised by the innovative Italian theater director Pippo Delbono. Most recently their coproduced Delta Park (2016), a record of the daily lives of an enclave of undocumented African immigrants housed in a hotel in Lombardy, was presented to much acclaim at the 2017 Festival Internationale Jean Rouch. BRIGNONE, GUIDO (1886–1959). Actor and director. Born into a theatrical family—his father Giuseppe was a distinguished stage actor and his sister Mercedes acted on both the stage and screen—Brignone joined the Film d’Arte Italiana as an actor in 1913. Within three years, he had graduated to directing, and for the next decade, he worked for all the major Italian studios. During the massive downturn in the industry in the early 1920s, he continued to direct the only successful films that were being made at the time, the FertPittaluga films featuring the legendary Maciste, which included the famous Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926) that would later so inspire the young Federico Fellini. Brignone then worked in France and Germany for several years before being enticed back to the modernized Cines studios in Rome by Stefano Pittaluga at the beginning of the sound era.

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A prolific and highly professional director who could work across many genres with ease and who acquired a particular reputation for being able to get the best out of actors, Brignone made more than 30 features in the following years, ranging from the legal thriller Corte d’Assise (Court of Assizes, 1930), through sophisticated comedies such as Paradiso (Paradise, 1932) to historical melodramas such as Teresa Confalonieri (Loyalty of Love, 1934), which received much acclaim at the Venice Festival that year. His most popular film during this period, however, was undoubtedly Vivere (To Live, 1936), an unashamedly heartstrings-tugging melodrama built around the famous tenor Tito Schipa, with a catchy title song penned by Cesare Bixio. In the postwar period, Brignone continued to work in popular genres such as the musical and the Neapolitan melodrama. He concluded his career with Nel segno di Roma (Sheba and the Gladiator, 1959), a sword-and-sandal epic in which Anita Ekberg as Zenobia, queen of Palmira, battles for the sake of love against the military might of Rome. BRIZZI, ANCHISE (1887–1964). Cinematographer. Brizzi began his career as a cameraman in the mid-1910s, graduating to director of photography a decade later while working on two of the later Maciste films, Maciste e il nipote d’America (Maciste and the American Nephew, 1924), directed by Eleuterio Rodolfi, and Guido Brignone’s Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni (The Hero of the Circus, 1926). He first distinguished himself, however, with his cinematography on Alessandro Blasetti’s Risorgimento epic 1860 (also known as Gesuzza, the Garibaldian Wife, 1933), often regarded as a forerunner of postwar Neorealism. Three years later, Brizzi collaborated with fellow cinematographer Ubaldo Arata on Carmine Gallone’s ill-fated and highly rhetorical Roman epic Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal, 1937) before filming two of Mario Camerini’s finest films of the 1930s, Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1937) and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939). He subsequently worked with Mario Soldati on his first solo film, Dora Nelson (1939), and on several of Carmine Gallone’s musical films. In the immediate postwar period, Brizzi achieved what was perhaps the greatest success of his career with the grainy newsreel feel he gave to Vittorio De Sica’s Neorealist classic Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946). In the following years, he collaborated with Russian American actor-director Gregory Ratoff on several minor films, the most interesting of which was Black Magic (1949), a fictional biography of the 18th-century magician-adventurer Cagliostro that featured Orson Welles in the lead role. Brizzi then went on to photograph Welles’s own The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1951). He subsequently worked mostly on popular genre films including two of the Don Camillo films, Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don

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Camillo, 1953) and Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round, 1955), as well as one of the most popular of the Totò films, Totò, Peppino e le fanatiche (Totò, Peppino and the Fanatics, 1958). Perhaps rather appropriately for someone whose early experiences had been working on the Maciste films, Brizzi’s last credited cinematography was for the peplum Ursus e la ragazza tartara (Tartar Invasion, 1961). BRUSATI, FRANCO (1922–1993). Playwright, screenwriter, and director. Always more drawn to the theater than to cinema, Brusati nevertheless began working in the film industry in the late 1940s, first as assistant to Renato Castellani and Roberto Rossellini and soon as screenwriter for many other established directors, including Mario Camerini, Luciano Emmer, and Alberto Lattuada. After cowriting Camerini’s Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), Brusati was given the opportunity to direct his first film, Il padrone sono me (I Am the Boss, 1955), which he adapted from an elegiac early 20th-century novel by Alfredo Panzini. A tepid response to the film led Brusati to turn to the theater and write his first play, Il benessere (Affluence, 1959). The critical success of the play prompted a return to the big screen with Il disordine (Disorder, 1962), but the film’s very mixed reception led him to turn once again to the stage and write La fastidiosa (1963) and Pietà di novembre (1966), both judged best plays of the year by the Istituto del Dramma Italiano. Again encouraged by this success, Brusati wrote and directed Il suo modo di fare (also known in Italy as Tenderly but in the United States as The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No, 1968), a Capraesque comedy that paired George Segal with Virna Lisi, which he followed with I tulipani di Haarlem (Tulips of Haarlem, 1970), a profoundly heart-wrenching but thoroughly unsentimental love story that was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. He then made the film for which he is perhaps best remembered, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974), a tragicomic portrayal of the trials and tribulations of an Italian migrant worker in Switzerland, starring Nino Manfredi in one of his finest performances. The film was both a huge commercial and critical success, earning Brusati a David di Donatello for direction and a Nastro d’argento for Best Story. Although poorly distributed internationally, the film eventually received great acclaim in France, where it was nominated for a César, and in America, where in 1978 it received the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film. A year later, Dimenticare Venezia (To Forget Venice, 1979), a lesbian and gay drama haunted by past memories, brought Brusati a second David di Donatello, with the film also receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. In the 1980s, while adding to his reputation as a playwright with several more critically acclaimed plays, Brusati also directed Il buon

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soldato (The Good Soldier, 1982) and his final film, Lo zio indegno (The Sleazy Uncle, 1989), a warmhearted comedy that brought Vittorio Gassman a Nastro d’argento for his performance in the title role. BUY, MARGHERITA (1962–). Actress. One of the most impressive of the young actresses to emerge in the so-called New Italian Cinema of the 1990s, Buy studied at the Rome Accademia d’Arte Drammatica before beginning to work in television and onstage. After her notable appearance in Nino Bizarri’s La seconda notte (The Second Night, 1986) and Daniele Luchetti’s Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow, 1988), her acting talents really came to the fore in La stazione (The Station, 1990), the first film she made with her sometime husband, actor-director Sergio Rubini, and for which she received both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress in a leading role. She subsequently starred in a number of films directed by Giuseppe Piccioni, including Chiedi la luna (Ask for the Moon, 1991), Cuori al verde (Penniless Hearts, 1996), and Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World, 1999), in which she played the role of a young nun in an interpretation that brought her the award of a second David. Although competent enough in erotic and comic roles, as in Rubini’s Prestazione straordinaria (Working Overtime, 1994), Buy’s strengths continued to emerge more clearly in the more demanding dramatic characterizations that she continued to take on, such as that of the distraught wife forced to come to terms not only with her husband’s death in a car accident but also his previous homosexual double life in Ferzan Ozpetek’s La fate ignoranti (His Secret Life, 2001). After being very convincing as the timid and subdued mother in Paolo Virzì’s highly acclaimed coming-of-age comedy Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City, 2003), she pushed herself further in playing the psychologically scarred and abandoned wife and mother in Roberto Faenza’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel I giorni dell’abbandono (The Days of Abandonment, 2005). Having already become one of the most sought-after and awarded actresses in the industry in the new millennium, she continued in the next decade and a half to appear in more than 30 films, collaborating with practically all the major directors. She worked again with Ozpetek in Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition, 2007) and with Silvio Soldini in Giorni e nuvole (2007), in a nuanced performance that brought her a third David and her fourth Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. She also appeared in three of Nanni Moretti’s films, playing the wife of embattled filmmaker Paolo Bonomo (Silvio Orlando) in Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), the psychoanalyst in Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope, 2011) and the filmmaker on the edge of a nervous breakdown in Mia madre (My Mother), for which she again received both the David and the Nastro d’argento. But perhaps her most impressive performance of all during this busy period was in the role of Maria,

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the single mother of a premature baby having to endure months of waiting before discovering whether the child would survive, in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, 2009), a heartrending portrayal that earned her the prestigious Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Festival. Having played the vulnerable, and often betrayed, wife in so many films, in 2017 she was able to somewhat turn the tables on men, playing opposite Sergio Castellito in Alex Infascelli’s Piccoli crimini coniugali (Small Marital Crimes, 2017). More recently, after so many dramatic roles, she has made one of her few forays into comedy in Alessandro Aronadio’s Io c’è (I Exists, 2018), playing the sister, and eventually accomplice, of the owner of a bed and breakfast in Rome who, in order to solve his financial woes, schemes to set up a new religion centered on the individual.

Margherita Buy and Stefano Accorsi in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life, 2001). Courtesy of Photofest.

C CABIRIA (1914). Silent film. The most financially successful and critically acclaimed of all the Greco-Roman superspectacles that characterized the Golden Age of the Italian cinema during the silent period, Cabiria was not only a masterpiece of silent filmmaking (realistic three-dimensional sets, use of tracking shots, artificial lighting, and external sequences shot on location) but also a masterstroke of entrepreneurship and marketing on the part of studio head and director Giovanni Pastrone. Set in the third century BC against the backdrop of the Second Punic War, Cabiria recounts the story of a young Roman girl and her nurse who are kidnapped by pirates and taken to Carthage, where the prepubescent girl is destined to be sacrificed to the fire god Moloch. Fulvia Axilla, a Roman spy living in Carthage, responds to the pleas of Cabiria’s nurse and, with the help of his powerful and faithful African slave Maciste, attempts to liberate the girl. The attempt only half succeeds; Cabiria is left with Queen Sofinisba, and Maciste is eventually overpowered and chained to a millstone, although Fulvia Axilla escapes to help Rome fight the war against Carthage. Years later, he returns to liberate Maciste and, with his help, Cabiria, who in the meantime has grown into a beautiful young woman who now falls in love with her rescuer. The script was, for the most part, a loose adaptation of a pulp novel by Italian exotic adventure writer Emilio Salgari, but the head of Itala Film, Giovanni Pastrone, who had already directed the hugely popular La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1911), had meticulously researched the historical details, hired the remarkable Segundo de Chomón as cinematographer, and clearly planned to produce the most spectacular historical epic to date. With the film already well into production, Pastrone traveled to Paris to meet with the leading Italian writer at the time, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and attempt to engage his collaboration. In essence D’Annunzio was offered, and gladly accepted, 50,000 lira to rewrite the intertitles, revise the title of the film and the names of the characters, and publicly assume paternity of the work, which then would be “realized” by Piero Fosco, the pseudonym Pastrone

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proposed for himself. The film (whose name D’Annunzio changed from Il romanzo delle fiamme to Cabiria) was thus explicitly marketed as an excursion into the seventh art by the illustrious writer himself. Described in the publicity as a “cinematographic opera,” with the intertitles sold as libretti in the theater foyers, the film was premiered in Turin at the prestigious Teatro Vittorio Emmanuele on 18 April 1914. Its screening was accompanied by a specially written musical score by Ildebrando Pizzetti, which was performed by an orchestra of 80 and a choir of 70 voices. Its premiere in Rome four days later was equally grandiose, with the added element of an airplane dropping flyers over the center of the city on the afternoon of the opening to advertise the event. The film was an instant and overwhelming success not only in Italy, where it was hailed as the fruit of D’Annunzio’s genius, but also in the United States, where it screened in all the major cities for many months on end. It must also have impressed D. W. Griffith, since the Babylonian episode of Intolerance seems to bear all the signs of direct influence. In the 21st century perhaps more talked about than seen, Cabiria nevertheless continues, justifiably, to be regarded as the highest point reached by the Italian silent cinema in its Golden Age.

The Temple of Moloch in Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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CALAMAI, CLARA (1915–1998). Actress. One of the leading Italian female film stars of the interwar period, Calamai first appeared (as Clara Mais) in Aldo Vergano’s historical costume drama Pietro Micca (1938). Her first major role was in Ferdinando Maria Poggioli’s elegiac melodrama about student life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin, Addio giovinezza (Goodbye Youth, 1940), where she played the part of the seductive older woman. She was again the temptress in Raffaello Matarazzo’s white telephone comedy L’avventuriera del piano di sopra (The Adventuress from the Floor Above, 1941) but achieved national notoriety for a scene in Alessandro Blasetti’s La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1942) in which she appeared, for a moment, bare breasted. However, while this undoubtedly contributed to her erotic pinup image at the time, her enduring place in Italian film history was earned by her much more nuanced interpretation of the character of Giovanna, the adulterous wife, in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), a role that had been marked originally for Anna Magnani. Although slightly compromised by association with the previous regime, Calamai’s career continued into the immediate postwar period with very creditable performances in Mario Camerini’s Resistance drama Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945) and Duillio Coletti’s L’adultera (The Adulteress, 1946), for which she received the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. From this point, however, her career quickly declined, and she subsequently appeared in a handful of only minor films. Perhaps in homage to her brilliant work in Ossessione, Visconti gave her cameo roles in Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957), where she played the part of a passing prostitute, and as an ex-starlet in “La strega bruciata viva” (“The Witch Burned Alive”), an episode Visconti made for the compilation film Le streghe (The Witches, 1967). Ironically, for someone who had been regarded as one of the foremost beauties of the Italian screen, her very last appearance on film was as the old and crazed murderess in Dario Argento’s horror film classic Profondo rosso (Deep Red, 1975). CALCINA, VITTORIO (1847–1916). Photographer and cameraman. A professional photographer with a successful studio in Turin in the 1890s, Vittorio Calcina was also the Italian concessionary agent of the Société Anonyme des Plaques et Papiers Photographiques A. Lumière & Ses Fils. Being thus among the first to have access to the Lumière cinématographe, he organized some of the very first demonstrations of the invention in Italy, beginning with a screening in Milan on 29 March 1896 and soon spreading to other Italian cities. In addition to actively promoting the new invention for its documentary and educational potential, Calcina began to shoot films himself. He soon succeeded in attracting the interest of members of the royal house, who not only requested numerous private screenings but also conferred on him the status of royal documentarist, a position that allowed him

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to use the cinématographe to record all major state and royal occasions. One of his most famous newsreels from this period, and thus one of the earliest pieces of film shot in Italy, recorded the king and queen as they descend the steps of the royal palace at Monza. In 1899, Calcina and a partner opened one of the first permanent movie houses in Turin, but in 1901, he sold his share and returned to his photographic practice. His interest in cinema continued, however, and between 1908 and 1911, he worked on, and eventually patented, a 16 mm camera that he called the Cine Parvus. Unfortunately, circumstances continued to delay commercial production of the apparatus, and Calcina died before he could see the project come to fruition. CALIGARI, CLAUDIO (1948–2015). Director and screenwriter. With only three feature films to his name—and the third still in postproduction at the time of his relatively early death—Caligari has nevertheless come to be widely regarded as one of the most significant Italian filmmakers of the postwar era. With a fervent sense of social commitment and strongly influenced by the writings and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Caligari began making a series of short and mid-length documentaries in the later 1970s, attempting to register the disillusionment of young people with the failures of the revolutionary movement that had exploded in 1968 but had soon declined and generated the birth of the so-called ’77 Movement. Identifying widespread drug use as one of the most destructive results of the disillusionment, he attempted, in collaboration with fellow aspiring filmmaker Daniele Segre, to address the issue in Droga che fare (Drugs—What Is to Be Done, 1976). After a number of other documentaries on the ’77 Movement, among them Alice e gli altri (Alice and the Others, 1977) and La parte bassa (The Low Side, 1978), made in collaboration with Franco Barbero, Caligari returned to the issue of drug use in Italy when he was finally able to produce his first feature film in 1983. Filmed in the Roman seaside borgata of Ostia where Pasolini had met his death, and using nonprofessional actors, most of whom were themselves former drug users, Amore tossico (Toxic Love, 1983) was a no-holds-barred portrait of the drug culture rampant in Rome at the time. The film screened at the Venice Festival where it received the De Sica Award, but the rawness of its realistic, and nonmoralistic and nonjudgmental, depiction of the lifestyle of its four hapless drug-addicted protagonists divided the critics and made it a cause célèbre. The film ignited so much controversy that it came to be literally arraigned on national television, with Caligari and the cast and crew of the film put in the dock and asked to explain themselves, conservative film critic Alberto Farassino prosecuting the case against, and veteran filmmaker Marco Ferreri fiercely defending it as a minor masterpiece.

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In part due to the film’s critical demonization and in part due to Caligari’s unwillingness to acquiesce to the compromises inherent in the production of commercial cinema, 15 years passed before he was able to finance his second feature, L’odore della notte (The Scent of the Night, 1998). Adapted from a novel by Dido Sacchettoni, it centered on the violent crime spree carried out mostly in the more affluent suburbs of Rome by the notorious Clockwork Orange Gang between 1979 and 1983. A powerful action-crime thriller, anticipating by almost a decade the disturbing depiction of the violent Roman underworld in later films like Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005) and openly acknowledging the influence of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976) without descending to mere imitation, the film received nominations for the Nastro d’argento for its producer and for Valerio Mastrandrea as Best Actor. Despite continuing to plan a host of new projects, Caligari was unable to get close to funding a further film until 2002 when his screenplay for another raw crime film, Anni rapaci (Rapacious Years), was on the threshold of production but fell through just before the start of filming. Twelve more years passed before Caligari—largely through the efforts of Mastrandrea, who took on the role of producer, even publicly petitioning Martin Scorsese to come on board as a coproducer—was able to begin filming his third feature, Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad, 2015). Something of a revisitation of Pasolini’s Accattone some 60 years later, and an homage to the films of Scorsese and John Cassavetes, Non essere cattivo finally brought Caligari the official recognition of Davids for Best Film and Best Director, a Special Nastro d’argento, and the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub), Gillo Pontecorvo, Pasinetti, and Schermi di qualità awards at the Venice Festival. The film was also selected as Italy’s candidate for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film but, in the event, failed to make it into the Academy’s short list. Such recognition was undoubtedly welcome, but, suffering the relapse of an earlier illness, Caligari had only been able to shoot the film with great difficulty; he passed away while the film was in its final stages of postproduction supervised by Mastrandrea. CALOPRESTI, MIMMO (1955–). Screenwriter, actor, producer, and director. Having moved with his family from his native Calabria to Turin in the early 1960s, Calopresti, born Domenico Calopresti, developed an interest in using cinema for social action during his teens. After producing several prizewinning videos and a number of historical documentaries for the Democratic Workers Movement and RAI television, in 1995 he directed his first feature film, La seconda volta (The Second Time), an exploration of the personal consequences of the political terrorism of the 1970s that was invited to compete for the Palme d’or at Cannes and, in Italy, earned its female lead, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the David di Donatello for Best Actress. This was

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followed by La parola amore esiste (Notes of Love, 1998), the bittersweet tale of a dysfunctional infatuation with the notion of love itself, and the semiautobiographical Preferisco il rumore del mare (I Prefer the Sound of the Sea, 1999). In 2002, he was able to bring his own acting talents to the fore playing the male lead in Francesca Comencini’s Le parole di mio padre (The Words of My Father, 2002), an elegant and sensitive adaptation of a novel by Italo Svevo, soon also directing himself in his fourth feature, La felicità non costa niente (Happiness Costs Nothing, 2003). He subsequently produced Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s directorial debut, È più facile per un cammello . . . (It’s Easier for a Camel . . ., 2003), which he followed with Volevo solo vivere (I Only Wanted to Live, 2006), a documentary bringing together the testimonies of nine Jewish Italian concentration camp survivors, coproduced by RAI cinema and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Institute. He was able to strike a lighter note with his fifth feature, L’abbuffata (The Binge, 2007), a film that follows three young men in a small town in southern Italy trying to make their own first film, but returned to socially committed documentary filmmaking with La fabbrica dei tedeschi (The Germans’ Factory, 2008), an in-depth investigation of a deadly fire at the Turin ThyssenKrupp steelworks a year earlier in which seven local workers had lost their lives. A year later, again slightly lighter in tone, La maglietta rossa (The Red T-Shirt, 2009) used stock footage and extended interviews to revisit the 1976 Davis Cup tennis final, held in Santiago, Chile, and at which the Italian players, Adriano Panatta and Paolo Bertolucci, wore red T-shirts in the face and defiance of the fiercely anticommunist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. After also publishing the semiautobiographical novel Io e l’avvocato (The Lawyer and Me) in 2013 and producing and acting in Mirafiori Lunapark (2014), a film about three former workers of the Turin FIAT Mirafiori car factory attempting to save the old plant from being demolished by transforming it into a fairground, he directed his sixth feature, Uno per tutti (One for All, 2015), a noir set in Trieste in which three old friends from the past find themselves brought together in the present and are forced to confront a wicked moral quandary created by one of their children. A year later, he returned to nonfiction with La fabbrica fantasma (The Phantom Factory, 2016), an attempt to investigate the production and distribution of counterfeit goods throughout Europe, followed by Immondezza (Rubbish, 2017), a documentary to help spread the message of Roberto Cavallo’s “Keep Clean and Run” environmental project aiming to locate and remove rubbish throughout Italy. Most recently Colapresti has returned to feature filmmaking with Aspromonte, le terra degli ultimi (Aspromonte, Land of the Last, 2019), set in a small town in Calabria in the 1950s where a death in the town due to a lack of access to medical services leads the inhabitants to band together to build their own road.

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CALVESI, MAURIZIO (1954–). Cinematographer. One of the most esteemed directors of photography presently working in the Italian cinema, Calvesi served an apprenticeship as camera operator on some dozen films in the 1980s before graduating to director of photography on Maurizio Ponzi’s feminist coming-of-age drama Volevo i pantaloni (I Wanted Pants, 1990). He thereafter worked with all the major Italian directors, winning the Nastro d’argento for his cinematography on Roberto Andò’s family thriller Viaggio segreto (Secret Journey, 2006) and Ferzan Ozpetek’s Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons, 2010). He also garnered Golden Globes for his photography on Mohsen Melliti’s Io, l’altro (Me, the Other, 2006) and Roberto Faenza’s elegant historical costume drama, I viceré (The Viceroys, 2007), for which he also received the Cinecittà Holding Prize and a nomination for the David di Donatello. With more than 90 films to his credit, he has more recently received nominations for Davids for Claudio Caligari’s Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad, 2015), Italy’s proposed candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and Andò’s political mystery thriller Le confessioni (The Confessions, 2017). CAMERINI, MARIO (1895–1981). Screenwriter and director. One of the foremost directors of Italian cinema in the interwar years, Camerini started writing subjects for films while still in high school. After serving as an infantry officer during World War I, he began working in the cinema as assistant to Augusto Genina and then for his own brother, Augusto, who helped him finance his first solo film, Jolly, clown da circo (Jolly, 1923). With national film production in decline during this period, Camerini found work at Stefano Pittaluga’s Fert studios in Turin, where he directed a number of films on commission, including two of the popular strongman films, Saetta principe per un giorno (Saetta, Prince for a Day, 1924) and Maciste contro lo sceicco (Maciste in Africa, 1925). Disagreements with Pittaluga led him to join with a number of other directors to create the independent production company Autori Direttori Italiani Associati, with which he produced Kif Tebbi (1928), a love story filmed on location in Africa that attracted the sizable sum of 50,000 lire from the Ministry for Education as encouragement. Camerini then directed what is generally regarded as his first major film, Rotaie (Rails, 1929), a powerful, moody melodrama clearly influenced by contemporary German cinema, recounting the redemptive journey of a suicidal young couple. Made silent but rereleased in a sound version in 1931, the film was enormously successful and firmly established Camerini’s credentials both at home and abroad. Indeed, on the strength of the film’s success, Camerini was invited to Paramount’s Joinville studios in Paris to work on a multiple-language adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Victory, and it was here that he was able to familiarize himself with the new sound technology.

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Returning to Italy, he began to work at the new Cines studios, directing Figaro e la sua gran giornata (Figaro and His Great Day, 1931) and Gli uomini che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932), the first of a series of well-crafted romantic comedies featuring Vittorio De Sica and Assia Noris for which he would come to be favorably compared with directors like René Clair and Ernst Lubitsch. Two years later, however, Il cappello a tre punte (Three-Cornered Hat) brought him into conflict with the authorities. A historical costume drama set in Naples under Spanish domination, and adapted from a novel by Pedro de Alarcón, the film included a number of sequences that Benito Mussolini himself judged as too openly critical of constituted authority, and so the film was obliged to be cut before it could be released commercially in 1935. Whether by accident or design, Il grande appello (The Last Roll-Call, 1936), set and photographed in East Africa just after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, appeared to offer at least moral support to the regime’s militant colonialism. Generally avoiding politics, however, Camerini returned to the winning formula of his earlier comedies and achieved a huge success with Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1937) and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939), both again starring Noris and De Sica. This was followed by I promessi sposi (The Spirit and the Flesh, 1941), an elegant adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s 19th-century novel that is still regarded by many as the definitive cinematic version of this classic text. After the disruption caused by World War II, Camerini returned to the cinema and produced a considerable body of work, but he was never able to regain either the critical or popular success of his earlier period. Immediately after the war, he made Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945), one of the first films to be set within the context of the Resistance. This was followed by Molti sogni per le strade (Woman Trouble, 1948) and Il brigante Musolino (Outlaw Girl, 1950), a dark melodrama starring Amedeo Nazzari and Silvana Mangano about a man falsely convicted of a crime returning to wreak revenge on those responsible for his imprisonment. Following Gli eroi della domenica (Sunday Heroes, 1952), a film about soccer that starred not only an athletic Raf Vallone and a very young Marcello Mastroianni but also the entire A. C. Milan team, Camerini directed the big-budget American-Italian coproduction Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), with Kirk Douglas playing the lead. After La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, 1955), a remake of Il cappello a tre punte that restored the jibes against the authorities that had been originally cut by Fascist censorship, and the heart-tugging melodrama Suor Letizia (The Awakening, 1956), Camerini directed Crimen (And Suddenly It's Murder, 1960), a contorted crime comedy set in Montecarlo that, despite the presence of actors of the caliber of Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi, and Franca Valeri, elicited only a very lukewarm success.

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Camerini continued to make a variety of films in the early 1960s, including I briganti italiani (Seduction of the South, 1961), a bandit film set in the Risorgimento period that chose to use American actor Ernest Borgnine in the lead role, and two adventure fantasies set in India, Kali Yug, la dea della vendetta (Vengeance of Kali, 1963) and its sequel, Mistero del tempio indiana (The Mystery of the Indian Temple, 1963). However, by the end of the decade, he had largely retired from the industry, his last film being one of the Don Camillo series, Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (Don Camillo and Today’s Youth, 1972). CAMPOGALLIANI, CARLO (1885–1974). Actor and director. Campogalliani began his film career as an actor during the early silent period, first appearing as the Fool in Giuseppe De Liguoro’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear made for Milano Films in 1910. After roles in a number of major silent films, including Luigi Maggi’s Satana (Satan, 1912) and Mario Caserini’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1913), he played the lead in Edoardo Bencivenga’s Napoleone, epopea napoleonica (The Napoleonic Epics, 1914) before graduating to directing on Il violino di Ketty (Ketty’s Violin, 1914), in which he also acted with his wife, Letizia Quaranta. He directed his wife in another half dozen crime thrillers and made several of the Maciste films before founding his own production company, Campogalliani Film, in 1920. In 1922, he and Quaranta moved to South America, where he made films in Argentina and Brazil while also touring with his own theater company. Having returned to Europe in 1927, he worked in Germany for several years before returning to Italy at the beginning of the sound era to direct Cortile (Courtyard, 1931) and Medico per forza (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 1931), two of the very few films to feature the renowned comic stage actor Ettore Petrolini. After making an animated version of The Four Musketeers (I quattro moschettieri, 1936), which reputedly involved the construction and manipulation of more than 3,500 marionettes, he made what many regard as his finest film, Montevergine (also known as La grande luce [The Great Light], 1939), which was awarded the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Festival in 1939. In the postwar period, he worked across a range of the popular genres, from light comedies and gothic mysteries to a number of sentimental melodramas adapted from the novels of Carolina Invernizio. Before retiring from the industry altogether in the early 1960s, he directed three well-respected sword-and-sandal epics, Il terrore dei barbari (Goliath and the Barbarians, 1959), Maciste nella valle dei re (Son of Samson, 1960) and Ursus (Ursus, 1961). His last film, Rosmunda e Alboino (Sword of the Conqueror, 1961), was a historical adventure fantasy set in the early Middle Ages, starring Jack Palance as the hero.

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CAPUANO, ANTONIO (1940–). Painter, set designer, and theater, television, and film director. After a period of working extensively in theater and television, Capuano made his directorial film debut with Vito e gli altri (Vito and the Others, 1991), a gritty and very realistic depiction of delinquent children in the poorer quarters of Naples that was awarded the International Critics Award at the 1992 Venice Festival and brought him the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. However, his second feature, Pianese Nunzio 14 anni a maggio (Sacred Silence, 1996), severely divided the critics at Venice in 1996 for its portrayal of a patently sexual relationship between a young street urchin with a beautiful voice and a courageous priest battling the Neapolitan Mafia. After “Sofialorèn,” a half-hour episode made as part of the ensemble film I Vesuviani (The Vesuvians, 1997), Capuano’s third feature, Polvere di Napoli (Dust of Naples, 1998), ironically updated the folkloric picture-postcard portrait of Naples provided in Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (Gold of Naples, 1954). Two years later, Naples was again the setting for the violent implosion of a ruling camorra family depicted with all the intensity of a Greek tragedy in Luna rossa (Red Moon, 2001). In his next feature, La guerra di Mario (Mario’s War, 2005), Capuano sensitively tackled the vexed issue of temporary adoption before an abrupt turn toward the mystery thriller in Giallo? (2009), an intriguing story set in an anonymous city in which a man’s lonely existence appears to be invaded by his doppelgänger. A year later, he returned to a hard-edged realism in Amore buio (Dark Love, 2010), the story of an epistolary relationship that develops between a young boy who is now in prison for taking part in a gang rape of a young girl, and the girl who had been the victim. A moving tale about the possibility of redemption, the film was highly praised and won the Lanterna Magica, the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub), and the AIF awards when it premiered at the Venice Festival and a subsequent nomination for the Nastro d’argento for its screenplay. Five years later, Bagnoli Jungle (2015) examined the lives of three men of different generations living in the decaying outlying industrial quarter of Naples before another abrupt turn more recently in Achille Tarallo (2018), a very colorful madcap comedy about a Neapolitan bus driver who attempts with verve but little talent to become an entertainer. CARDINALE, CLAUDIA (1938–). Actress. Born in Tunisia of Italian parents, Cardinale moved to Italy in 1958 and studied briefly at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before securing a long-term acting contract with producer Franco Cristaldi, whom she would later marry. After interpreting supporting roles in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), she was able to display her acting abilities to the full in Valerio Zurlini’s La ragazza con la valigia (Girl with a Suit-

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case, 1961). Two years later, Federico Fellini perceptively cast her as the director’s luminous muse in his Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963), but her most impressive appearance during this period was undoubtedly as the radiant Angelica in Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Having achieved international status by this time, she began appearing in Hollywood films such as Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther (1963) and Henry Hathaway’s Circus World (1964), although her acting talents continued to be better showcased in Italian films such as Francesco Maselli’s Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference, 1964) and Visconti’s Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra of a Thousand Delights, 1965). After acquitting herself brilliantly in the only significant female role in Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968), her interpretation of Carmela, the proxy wife in Luigi Zampa’s Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia, 1971), brought her a first David di Donatello award. In the 1970s, she separated from Cristaldi and married director Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she worked extensively from then on. In 1982, she received her second Nastro d’argento for her supporting role in Liliana Cavani’s wartime drama, La pelle (The Skin, 1982), and two years later she was awarded the Pasinetti Prize and a third Nastro d’argento for her portrayal of Benito Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, in Squitieri’s Claretta (Claretta Petacci, 1984). In subsequent years, she continued to appear on the big screen, but she did some of her best work for television, as in her portrayal of Jewish schoolteacher Ida Ramada in Cristina Comencini’s television adaptation of Elsa Morante’s novel La storia (History, 1987). Still widely regarded as one of the finest actresses of her generation, in 1993 she was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival for her lifetime achievement. In 1997, she was also feted with a Special David for her entire career and, two years later, was able to publish her autobiography, Io Claudia, tu Claudia. In the new millennium, she turned to the stage and acquitted herself well in her interpretation of theater classics like the anonymous 16th-century comedy La Venexiana (The Venetian Girl) and plays by Luigi Pirandello and Tennessee Williams. On the big screen, she appeared mostly in minor roles or cameos. Most recently, however, her performance as Rosa in Giambattista Assanti’s Ultima fermata (The Last Stop, 2014) brought her a further nomination for a David for Best Supporting Actress. CARPIGNANO, JONAS (1984–). Screenwriter, director, and producer. Born in the Bronx in New York City to an Italian father and a mother originally from Barbados, Carpignano grew up alternating between New York and Rome. Having majored in film studies from Wesleyan University he enrolled for a period in the Graduate Program in Film and TV at New

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York University’s Tisch School of the Arts but left without graduating in favor of more hands-on experience in filmmaking in Italy. After acting as a runner on several Italian productions, he graduated to assistant (uncredited) on Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008). Following more collaborations on others’ films, in 2011 he wrote and directed his own short, A Chjàna (The Plain, 2011), a docudrama centered on two African immigrant workers caught up in a major race riot ignited by the shooting of two other African workers in the southern Italian town of Rosarno. Filmed almost entirely with a hand-held camera and employing nonprofessional actors, many of whom had been present at the original event, the film first screened at the Venice Festival where it won the Controcampo Italiano prize and, a year later, was awarded the Nastro d’argento Special Mention for Short Film. After a brief interval in America, working as assistant director on Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), he returned to live in Rosarno where he made his second impressive short, A Ciambra (Young Lions of Gypsy, 2014), narrating the story of one night in the life of Pio, a streetwise, chain-smoking 11-yearold Romani boy, played by the boy himself. Shown at Cannes as part of Critics Week, it won the Discovery award and, in Italy, a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Short Film. A year later, Carpignano drew on elements of both shorts in writing and directing his first full-length feature, Mediterranea (2015), a recounting of the treacherous journey of migration to Italy by two men from Burkina Faso in an ordeal that only intensifies when they attempt to settle and work in southern Italy. Premiered in the International Critics Week at Cannes, the film went on to win a host of awards at other festivals, as well as the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award and the National Board of Review’s prize for Best Directorial Debut. Two years later, Carpignano’s second feature, A Ciambra (The Ciambra, 2017), attracting the collaboration of no less than Martin Scorsese as coproducer, expanded the earlier short of the same name in a high-energy portrayal of Pio’s rambunctious coming of age at the age of 15. Winning the Label Europa Cinemas award when screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, it was subsequently nominated in seven David di Donatello categories, in the event winning Davids for Best Director and Best Editing and subsequently being put forward as Italy’s candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Having confirmed his status as one of the most promising filmmakers of recent years, Carpignano is presently writing his third feature, reputedly also set in Rosarno, although this time focused on the difficult life of a young white Italian girl living in the town’s historic center. See also EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION.

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CASERINI, MARIO (1874–1920). Director. Having joined the Alberini & Santoni company as an actor in 1905, Caserini graduated to directing when it was transformed into the Cines the following year. Demonstrating a marked predilection for literary and historical subjects, he directed a host of historical dramas and adaptations, among them Garibaldi (1908), Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet, 1909), Giovanna d ‘Arco (Joan of Arc, 1909), and Beatrice Cenci (1909), the last of which he filmed at the Castel Sant’Angelo in order to increase its historical authenticity. He was prolific, and his films were popular, his Catilina (1910) being sufficiently in demand to be screened in 14 different cinemas in Rome at the same time. After a brief period with Ambrosio Film, where he directed, among others, Dante e Beatrice (Dante and Beatrice, 1912) and the first long version of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1913), he joined the newborn Gloria Film, for which he directed an enormously popular version of Florette e Patapon (1913) and the even more acclaimed Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), the first film to star Lyda Borelli and the one that launched her as a diva. In the wake of the film’s enormous success, Camerini left Gloria in order to establish his own production company, with which he produced and directed a number of elegant upper-class melodramas starring Mario Bonnard and one of the other reigning divas, Leda Gys. However, when these two stars left, the company folded, and Camerini returned to Rome to direct for the Cines until his untimely death in 1920. Among the films of this last period were Resurrezione (Resurrection, 1917), Il filo della vita (The Thread of Life, 1918), Tragedia senza lagrime (Tragedy without Tears, 1919), and La voce del cuore (The Voice of the Heart, 1920). CASTELLANI, RENATO (1913–1985). Screenwriter and director. Often labeled a “calligrapher” because of his meticulous attention to the more formal and pictorial aspects of his films, Castellani grew up in Argentina before returning to Italy to study architecture at the Politecnico of Milan. While studying, he began experimenting with radio as an artistic medium. In 1936, he served as a military officer in Africa, where he came into contact with Mario Camerini, who was filming Il grande appello (The Last RollCall, 1936). After returning to Italy, he began working as a screenwriter for a number of established directors, including Camerini himself, and Alessandro Blasetti, for whom Castellani served as both screenwriter and assistant director on Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvator Rosa, 1939) and La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941). A year later, after having also worked as assistant director on Mario Soldati’s Malombra (1942), he wrote and directed his first film, Un colpo di pistola (A Pistol Shot, 1942), a highly composed and very elegant adaptation of a short story by Alexander Pushkin. This was followed by Zaza (1943, but only released

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in March 1944), a refined variation on the Lady of the Camelias theme to which Nino Rota contributed an original score, and La donna della montagna (The Mountain Woman, 1944). In the immediate postwar period, Castellani directed some theatrical revues (including a production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit) before embarking on a number of films in a decidedly Neorealist vein: Sotto il sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome, 1948), È primavera (It’s Forever Springtime, 1950), and the film for which he is best remembered, Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents Worth of Hope, 1952). The story of a young man who returns to his village in southern Italy after the war only to be confronted by dismal job prospects and the infuriating antics of a feisty young woman determined to marry him at any cost, Due soldi won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and a Nastro d’argento for Castellani as director. In 1954, a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, shot in Verona with scenography and costumes meticulously modeled on Italian Renaissance paintings, earned Castellani the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. The tragic love story I sogni nel cassetto (Dreams in a Drawer, 1957) was followed by Nella città l’inferno (. . . and the Wild Women, 1959), a film that brought Anna Magnani and Giulietta Masina together in the tough confines of an Italian women’s prison. Two years later, Il brigante (The Brigand, 1961), adapted from a novel by Giuseppe Berto, recounted the plight of a left-wing Calabrian peasant forced by circumstances to become an outlaw. Accompanied by the haunting music of Nino Rota, the film was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice in 1961. Less-than-memorable episodes in the compilation films Tre notti d’amore (Three Nights of Love, 1964) and Controsesso (Countersex, 1964) were followed by Questi fantasmi (Ghosts, Italian-Style, 1967), an only moderately successful adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s 1948 play, although well acted by Sophia Loren and Vittorio Gassman. Una breve stagione (A Brief Season, 1969) was his last work for the big screen before he devoted himself, like Roberto Rossellini, to television, for which he wrote and directed a very popular series on the life of Leonardo da Vinci (La vita di Leonardo da Vinci, 1971), a three-part fictional re-creation of Il furto della Gioconda (The Theft of the Mona Lisa, 1977), and a miniseries on the composer Giuseppe Verdi (Verdi, 1982). CASTELLITO, SERGIO (1953–). Actor and director. One of the new generation of actors who emerged in Italy in the 1980s, Castellito studied at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome and worked extensively in the theater before moving to films with a small part in Luciano Tovoli’s Il generale dell’armata morta (The General of the Dead Army, 1983). He played his first lead role in Felice Farina’s Sembra morto ma é solo svenuto (He Looks Dead but He Just Fainted, 1986) before also appearing in Ettore Scola’s La famiglia (The Family, 1986) and Ricky Tognazzi’s Piccoli equivoci (Little Mis-

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understandings, 1989). After being the piano player afflicted with priapism in Marco Ferreri’s La carne (The Flesh, 1991), he played the young psychiatrist in Francesca Archibugi’s Il grande cocomero (1993) and the affable photographer and conman in Giuseppe Tornatore’s L’uomo dalle stelle (The Star Maker, 1995). In the same year, he also scored a huge success as the legendary Italian cycling champion Fausto Coppi in the television miniseries Il grande Fausto (The Price of Victory, 1995), a popularity repeated four years later with his portrayal of the recently canonized priest in the twopart telemovie Padre Pio (1999). Continuing to display a remarkable versatility, he presented a very nuanced portrayal of a Jewish shopkeeper in Scola’s Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, 2001) before playing Caterina’s foolishly self-centered father in Paolo Virzì’s Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City, 2003) and a much more psychologically complex father (and son) in Marco Bellocchio’s L’ora di religione—il sorriso di mia madre (The Religion Hour—My Mother’s Smile, 2003). Having become well known outside Italy for his appearance in films such as Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu (The Big Blue, 1988), Jacques Rivette’s Va savoir (Who Knows?, 2001), and Sandra Nettelbeck’s Bella Martha (Mostly Martha, 2001), for which he won the European Film Award, he also began directing himself, first in Libero Burro (1999) and then in Non ti muovere (Don’t Move, 2004), an adaptation of a novel by his partner, Margaret Mazzantini, for which he received his third David di Donatello for acting and an Italian Golden Globe for his direction. In the new millennium, he continued to alternate between acting for other directors in films as varied as Gianni Amelio’s La stella che non c’é (The Missing Star, 2006), Jacques Rivette’s 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a Small Mountain, 2009), and Alex Infascelli’s Piccoli crimini coniugali (Partners in Crime, 2017), as well as taking the helm himself in bringing to the screen several other novels by Mazzantini as in Venuto al mondo (Twice Born, 2012) and Nessuno si salva da solo (You Can’t Save Yourself Alone, 2015). His most recent directorial triumph has been Fortunata (Lucky, 2017), which earned him a nomination for Best Director at Cannes, although perhaps his most memorable appearance has been on the small screen, where he has played the leading role of the psychotherapist, Dr. Giovanni Mari, in all three seasons (105 episodes) of Sky Italia’s In Treatment (2013–2017). More recently, his masterful performance as the real-life Mafia-fighting magistrate, Rocco Chinnici, in Michele Soavi’s miniseries Rocco Chinnici—è così lieve il tuo bacio sulla fronte (Rocco Chinnici—Your Light Kiss on My Forehead), drew an audience of almost five million prime-time viewers when screened on successive evenings in January 2018 and much acclaim for the actor in the accompanying social media.

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CATTLEYA. Film and television production company. Founded in 1997 by Riccardo Tozzi, who has remained its CEO ever since, Cattleya has grown in only two decades to become one of Italy’s foremost film and television production companies. Over the years, it has produced or coproduced some 60 feature films, including critical and commercial successes such as Gabriele Salvatores’s Io non ho paura (2003), Paolo Virzì’s Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City, 2003), Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005), and Luca Miniero’s Benvenuti al sud (Welcome to the South, 2010). In 2009, the company also moved into commercial advertising with its new arm, Think Cattleya. At the same time, Universal Pictures, through its sales unit, Focus Features International, took a minority stake in the Italian company whereby the two would coproduce several Italian films that Universal would then distribute internationally. With its recently produced films earning a lot less than long-form television series like Romanzo criminale (2008–2010) and Gomorra—la serie (2014–2018), in 2017, as Cattleya began shooting Suburra—la serie for Netflix, Tozzi announced that the company would be reducing its production of films and reorient itself more to television production. In the same year, Cattleya joined with four other film producers (Wildside, Lucisano Group, Palomar, and Indiana Production) and television broadcaster Sky to launch the new distribution company, Vision, to handle both theatrical distribution of its products as well as online streaming. The company has its official website at https:// www.cattleya.it. CAVANI, LILIANA (1933–). Director and screenwriter. Cavani began her career in cinema in the early 1960s with a prolific series of television documentaries on a wide variety of historical and social themes. Her first feature film, Francesco d’Assisi (Francis of Assisi, 1966), displaying the strong influence of Roberto Rossellini, was originally made for television on 16 mm film but eventually shown out of competition at Venice in 1967 to wide acclaim. Her next film, Galileo (Galileo Galilei, 1968), was also made for RAI television but, rather inexplicably, was rejected as unsuitable for general viewing and so was never shown on the small screen. I cannibali (The Year of the Cannibals, 1970), a provocative modern rendition of the Antigone story, was made with obvious allusion to the student uprisings of 1968. Then L’ospite (The Guest, 1971) explored mental instability and social marginalization, while Milarepa (1974) cast a rather romantic eye on Asian mysticism. However, it was her highly controversial Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) that brought her to international renown, followed by the similarly disputed Al di la del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977), a film about Lou Andreas Salome’s simultaneous affairs with poet Paul Ree and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. She continued to raise controversy with her adaptation of Curzio Malaparte’s wartime novel, La pelle (The Skin,

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1981), but returned to more religious themes with Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi, 1989), made in English and starring Mickey Rourke in an uncharacteristic role. After Dove siete? Io sono qui (Where Are You? I’m Here, 1993), which highlighted the problems of the hearing impaired, and Cavalleria rusticana (1996) and Manon Lascaut (1998), two operas for television, she made the internationally successful Il gioco di Ripley (Ripley’s Game, 2002), an adaptation of a popular Patricia Highsmith novel that starred the inimitable John Malkovich. Cavani returned to television in 2005, directing De Gasperi, l’uomo della speranza (De Gasperi, Man of Hope, 2005), a miniseries on the life of the influential Italian postwar statesman. In 2012, after many years of being dogged by controversy and regularly underappreciated as a director and writer, Cavani won the Special Pasinetti Prize at Venice for her short documentary Clarisse, and in the same year, she was awarded the David di Donatello for her career. Her contribution to filmmaking received further acknowledgment in 2018 when she was presented with the Robert Bresson Prize at the Venice Festival, making her the first woman ever to receive the award. CECCHI, EMILIO (1884–1966). Literary critic, translator, poet, novelist, film producer, artistic director, and screenwriter. Already a towering figure in Italian 20th-century literary history and widely respected as a fine translator, prose writer, critic, university professor, and art historian, Cecchi also came to make a significant contribution to the history of Italian cinema. In the wake of the untimely death of Stefano Pittaluga, producer and head of the newly reconstituted Cines studios in 1931, Cecchi was offered the post of artistic director. Having recently spent a period teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Cecchi had become very enthusiastic about cinema after a number of visits he had made to Hollywood, and so he readily accepted. He quickly set about improving not only the quantity but also the quality of films at Cines. As a writer himself, he sought to attract more writers and intellectuals into the industry, leading to films such as Acciaio (Steel, 1933), which saw the collaboration of Luigi Pirandello, author of the short story from which it was adapted, and a musical score especially written by composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Cecchi also strongly encouraged the making of quality documentaries, which until then had been the exclusive province of the Istituto LUCE. Raffaello Matarazzo and Umberto Barbaro were among the budding screenwriters and directors who produced some fine documentaries with Cecchi’s encouragement. Cecchi also helped realize such adventurous film projects as Alessandro Blasetti’s historical epic 1860 (Gesuzza, the Garibaldian Wife, 1933). Cecchi’s influence thus served to generate some real energy and momentum in an industry that had practically ground to a halt in the preceding decade.

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Nevertheless, Cecchi’s stay at the Cines was relatively brief. He left the studio in September 1933 after having spent only 16 months in the position. However, his enthusiasm and leadership during his period there had been a real boon for the industry. Furthermore, although Cecchi returned to his former literary and art-historical studies, he remained sporadically involved with cinema to the end of his life. Among his last contributions to Italian cinema were his collaborations on the screenplays of Renato Castellani’s Sotto il sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome, 1948) and Blasetti’s Roman epic Fabiola (1949). CECCHI D’AMICO, SUSO (1914–2010). Screenwriter. Married to musicologist Fedele D’Amico and daughter of scholar, writer, and erstwhile artistic director of the Cines studios, Emilio Cecchi, Suso Cecchi D’Amico (born Giovanna Cecchi) remains universally acknowledged as perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most prolific, screenwriter in postwar Italian cinema, having written or collaborated on the screenplays of more than 100 films in a career that spanned six decades. With a background in literature and translation, Cecchi D’Amico first came to screenwriting working with her father and with director Renato Castellani on Mio figlio professore (Professor, My Son, 1946). A year later, her contribution to the script of Luigi Zampa’s Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace, 1947) earned her a shared Nastro d’argento for Best Story. Having thus quickly discovered a natural talent for writing for the cinema, she subsequently contributed to practically all of the key films of the major postwar directors, including Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Michelangelo Antonioni’s La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953), Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), and Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962). She developed a particularly long and fruitful partnership with Luchino Visconti, working with him on most of his films from the 1950s onward, including Bellissima (1951), Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), and Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963); at the same time, she also collaborated with Zampa on Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial, 1952), with Castellani on È primavera (It’s Forever Springtime, 1950) and Nella città l’inferno (. . . and the Wild, Wild Women, 1959), and with Luigi Comencini on La finestra sul Luna-Park (The Window to Luna Park, 1957). Her filmography also included most of Alessandro Blasetti’s postwar films, among them Fabiola (1949), Prima comunione (Father’s Dilemma, 1950), Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954), and Io, io, io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966).

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Widely regarded as the doyenne of Italian screenwriters, she continued to work with both established and emerging directors. In the late 1990s, while helping Mario Monicelli turn out more caustic social satires such as Panni sporchi (Dirty Linen, 1999), she also collaborated with Martin Scorsese on his epic documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy (1999). Her last contribution to Italian cinema in the new millennium was working on the screenplay of Raul, il diritto di uccidere (Raul, the Right to Kill, 2005), a modern reworking of the theme of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, directed by Andrea Bolognini. In a brilliant career that spanned six decades, she shared an Oscar nomination, won the Nastro d’argento eight times and the David di Donatello twice, received the special Luchino Visconti Award, and, in 1994, earned a Special David for lifetime achievement. CECCHI GORI, MARIO (1920–1993). Producer. One of the leading producers in the Italian film industry for much of the postwar period, Mario Cecchi Gori began working in films as production manager for Dino De Laurentiis on Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). In the late 1950s, he founded his own production company, Fair Film, and achieved his first significant box office success with Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962). He subsequently worked with directors such as Risi, Ettore Scola, and Mario Monicelli to produce many of the classic films of the commedia all’italiana, winning the David di Donatello for Best Production with Risi’s La tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat, 1967). In the 1970s, he also moved successfully into the areas of exhibition, cable TV, and home video distribution. In the 1980s, via a number of different companies, the Cecchi Gori Group collaborated on a host of productions with Intercapital and CG Silver Film before forming the Gruppo Penta with Silvio Berlusconi, subsequently dissolved in 1994. In 1990, as well as receiving the David for Best Producer for Gabriele Salvatores’s Turné (Tour, 1990), Cecchi Gori was also awarded a David for his career. Among his other production credits were Federico Fellini’s La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989) and Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991). CECCHI GORI, VITTORIO (1942–). Producer and politician. Vittorio Cecchi Gori produced or coproduced more than 150 films since he entered the industry in 1980, first working with his father, veteran producer Mario Cecchi Gori, and then assuming control of the family company on his father’s death in 1993. Although an interest in politics, several television stations, and the difficult financial situation of the Fiorentina soccer team, which the family also owned, frequently diverted his attention from the cinema, he continued in the period immediately following his father’s death to

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produce a host of commercially viable films, scoring huge successes in particular with Leonardo Pieraccioni’s Il ciclone (The Cyclone, 1996) and Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997). In 1996, he shared an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA award for his coproduction of Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman, 1994), and in 2000, he was awarded a Special David di Donatello for his general services to Italian cinema. In the new millennium, however, a continuing series of financial woes and legal difficulties, which have included a declaration of bankruptcy of his major holding company in 2006 and a number of lawsuits raised in both Italy and the United States, have severely limited his effective involvement in film production; his only coproduction of note in recent years has been Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). CELI, ADOLFO (1922–1986). Actor. After graduating from the Rome Academy of Dramatic Art, Celi began his film career playing the kindly priest Don Pietro in Luigi Comencini’s Proibito rubare (No Stealing, 1948, also known in the United States as Guagliò). He then moved to Brazil where, for many years, he directed the Teatro Brasiliero in Sao Paolo and produced and directed a number of films in Portuguese. Returning to Europe in the early 1960s, he resumed what would soon become an international film career. He gave proof of his impressive versatility by playing characters as different as clergymen like Monseigneur Radini Tedeschi in Ermanno Olmi’s portrait of Pope John XXIII, E venne un uomo (A Man Named John, 1965), and Cardinal Giovanni de Medici in Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), as well as utter villains like the sadistic commandant Battaglia in Mark Robson’s Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and the ruthless SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), all in the same year. After appearing as the evil Valmont in Mario Bava’s Diabolik (Danger: Diabolik, 1967) and as King Boemondo in Mario Monicelli’s Brancaleone alle crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970), he gave a finely nuanced performance as Commissioner Rizzuto, the prison administrator in Marco Leto’s La villeggiatura (Black Holiday, 1973). Although he appeared in a host of other films, he is probably best remembered in Italy for his incarnation of the irrepressible doctor turned prankster, Professor Sassaroli, in Monicelli’s provocative comedy Amici miei (My Friends, 1975) and its two equally outrageous sequels, Amici miei atto II (All My Friends, Part 2, 1982) and Amici miei atto III (All My Friends, Part 3, 1985). CENSORSHIP. Film censorship regulations were first introduced in Italy in 1913 by a law that established the requirement for all films to be furnished with an official written release (nulla osta) from the Ministry for the Interior,

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granted on the basis of the film’s having been viewed and approved by a designated police commissioner. Henceforth the release of any film, and thus the possibility of its being screened in public, was made conditional on the attested absence of any material that could be deemed offensive to public morality, national decorum, international relations, or any official state institution (including the police). These provisions were reinforced by a new decree in 1919, passed into law in 1920, that reassigned the responsibility for recommending or withholding the award of the nulla osta to a designated commission composed of a magistrate, a teacher, an artist, a publicist, a mother, and two members of the police force. The new law also imposed the further requirement that the subject or screenplay of any prospective film be submitted to, and approved by, the censorship commission before any actual filming was begun. The incoming Fascist government thus found itself already provided with a fairly strict censorship regime when it came to power in 1922, and the first Fascist law regarding films, promulgated in 1923, merely reaffirmed the provisions of the previous two laws, while stipulating a further prohibition against the inclusion of any scenes that might incite conflict or hatred between the social classes. A number of subsequent Fascist laws and decrees introduced a requirement for the commission to indicate whether a film might be deemed unsuitable for minors (below the age of 16) and progressively modified the makeup of the censorship board itself, which, by 1931, came to be composed of a representative of the Fascist Party, designated members of the police force and of the Ministry for Corporations, a judicial magistrate, and a mother. In addition, from 1933 onward, all foreign films, as well as being subject to normal censorship regulations, were required to be dubbed into Italian—and in Italy—in order to obtain a general release. In 1934, the responsibility for preventive censorship over prospective films, together with all other aspects of film production and exhibition, was assumed by the newly formed Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia (General Directorate of Cinematography), headed by Luigi Freddi. In the same year, the Vatican also established the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Catholic Cinema Center), which regularly published its own moral evaluation of films that might be shown in the church’s extensive network of parish cinemas, thus also effectively exercising a censorial function. As war loomed in 1939, further and more restrictive forms of censorship were promulgated, granting the government the power to prohibit and withdraw from circulation any film that might be regarded as in any way “socially dangerous,” including films that had already been granted a nulla osta. Immediately following the war, in October 1945, a legislative decree from the new interim government summarily abolished all Fascist regulations relating to the film industry but retained the basic censorship prescriptions of the 1923 law. In 1947, the Constituent Assembly, by the same act with which

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it instituted a Central Office for Cinematography under the direction of the undersecretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, also reconfirmed the censorship provisions of the 1923 law. Although presenting the screenplay before commencement of filming was no longer stipulated as a legal requirement, producers were nevertheless strongly encouraged to do so in order to avoid the risk of the film being eventually refused a general release by the censorship board, which would now be composed of only a member of the Central Office for Cinematography, a judicial magistrate, and a delegated representative of the Ministry for the Interior. As a result, film censorship during the early years of the Italian Republic came to reproduce quite closely the previous situation under Fascism, with the state and its bureaucracy exercising a determining influence over what sorts of films were produced and shown. One of the first films to fall foul of the new censorship regime was Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1948) due to what was alleged to be its “social pessimism.” Two years later, the release of Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950) was similarly held up by the censorship commission on the allegation that a number of the scenes set in Rome presented the police force in an unfavorable light. It was during this period that Undersecretary Giulio Andreotti, in his role as head of the Central Office for Cinematography, frequently took the opportunity publicly to reprimand Neorealist directors like Vittorio De Sica for their negative portrayal of Italy, with a number of Neorealist films consequently having their export permits withheld. At the same time, Mario Monicelli’s Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina, 1955), a film in which the great comic actor Totò played a warmhearted police sergeant willing to bend the rules in order to help out a young unmarried pregnant woman, was held up for almost two years and only released after 32 cuts had been made to attenuate its alleged poor reflection on the forces of law and order. By far the most glaring intervention by the censors during this period, however, occurred in 1953 when filmmaker Renzo Renzi and editor and film critic Guido Aristarco were arrested, tried, and given prison sentences for having published the screenplay for a prospective film about the Italian invasion of Greece during World War II, in which the Italian army was shown to be more interested in chasing women than in fighting the enemy. In April 1955, a group of film writers and directors, including Sergio Amidei, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alessandro Blasetti, Giuseppe De Santis, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Carlo Lizzani, among others, issued a manifesto calling for an end to repressive film censorship on the part of the Italian state. Nevertheless, the next major law regulating the Italian cinema, passed in 1956, merely reiterated the provisions of the earlier law, and a revision of the entire system of film censorship,

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frequently promised by the ruling center-right government, was endlessly postponed in all the other film legislation enacted during the following six years. The long-awaited new law, finally promulgated in April 1962, transferred responsibility for issuing the nulla osta to the Ministry for Tourism and Spectacle and provided for a much greater representation on the censorship boards of qualified academics and members of the film industry. More importantly, under the new legislation films could only be denied a general release on the grounds of seriously offending a generically defined “common sense of decency.” In addition, the new law gave the censorship boards the option of classifying a film as either for general release or as unsuitable for minors (under 18 years of age), in which case the film could not be shown on television. These censorship provisions were largely reiterated in the next major piece of legislation on the cinema, the so-called Corona law, passed in 1965. One should note, however, that films granted a general release by the censorship commissions could still be denounced as offensive to common decency by both members of the general public or by police or magistrates in the place where the film was first shown. The most acrimonious censorship struggles of the following decade were all, in fact, the result of such denunciations, the most glaring case being the long-running battle over Bernardo Bertolucci’s Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), a film that had been granted its release by the censorship commission but that was subsequently arraigned and condemned for obscenity by a court of appeal, which took the extraordinary step of ordering all copies of the film in Italy to be burned. After a long legal saga, Bertolucci’s film was formally exonerated in Italy only in 1987. The abolition of the Ministry for Tourism and Spectacle in 1993 prompted a new law in 1995 that reallocated responsibility for the vetting of films and the granting of the nulla osta to the Department of Spectacle, located in the Office of the Prime Minister. The same law restructured the censorship commissions by reducing the representatives from the film industry to two but including a practicing psychologist and two representatives of interested family organizations. In 1998, responsibility for granting the nulla osta was transferred to the newly established Ministry for Culture. In that same year, Totò che visse due volte (Totò Who Lived Twice), a film by the provocative filmmaking duo Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, was refused a general release on the grounds of obscenity and blasphemy. When the film was finally granted a release on appeal, the ruling center-left government put forward a proposal to withdraw the power of the censorship commissions to block the theatrical release of a film, retaining merely the possibility of awarding either a general release or an unsuitable for under 18, or under 14, classification. The end of film censorship in Italy, however, effectively occurred only in 2007 when a different center-left government abolished the censorship boards altogether

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in favor of a system of film classification to be carried out by the producers themselves, whereby films should be designated as either suitable for the general public or as unsuitable for either under 18, or under 14, years of age. The abolition of state censorship over theatrical release was reconfirmed in the new comprehensive law of 2017, although a new designatory category of under six years of age was also introduced. CENTOAUTORI (100AUTORI). Association. Founded in 2008 as an industry-wide association for promoting and safeguarding the rights of Italian authors working in the audiovisual field, 100autori has grown to be one of the most representative lobby groups in Italy, including in its ranks many of the foremost writers and directors working in the film and television industry. As well as strongly lobbying for a stricter administration, and more equitable remuneration, of copyright of audiovisual content, it has also sought to be included in all the important government bodies dealing with regulating film, television, and internet production in Italy. Among its most notable successes in the first 10 years of existence have been its successful advocacy for the inclusion of documentary films in the annual David di Donatello Awards; a greater recognition of, and support for, women in the industry; the inauguration of “Le Giornate degli autori / Venice Days” as an autonomous section of the Venice Festival dedicated to showcasing the work of independent writers and auteurs; and the sponsoring of a special award for screenwriting for television at the Roma Fiction Fest. Now a major presence in the Italian audiovisual landscape, 100autori is also a member of the Fédération Européenne des Realisateurs de l’Audiovisuelle (FERA) and has its own website at http://www.100autori.it. CENTRO SPERIMENTALE DI CINEMATOGRAFIA (CSC; EXPERIMENTAL CENTER FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY). National film institute and film school. Instituted in 1935 with Luigi Chiarini as founding director, the Centro Sperimentale was one of the first concrete initiatives taken by the Fascist regime to help revive the fortunes of Italian cinema. In addition to teaching students all aspects of filmmaking, in 1937 the Centro began publishing its official journal, Bianco e nero, and in 1940 moved to its purpose-built location on the Via Tuscolana, opposite the newly built Cinecittà. After some disruption during the latter part of the war, which saw part of its resources confiscated and dispersed by the retreating German forces, the Centro was reinstated and, in 1949, also took on the function of housing a national film library. In 1965, the Centro’s book library, named after its founding director, was also officially charged with retaining a copy of the screenplay of every national film. Between 1968 and 1974, under the interim direction of Roberto Rossellini, who had been brought in during a

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period of crisis, courses at the school were enlarged to include interdisciplinary courses on mass communication and an opening to the new medium of television. In 1997, legislation transformed the Centro into a foundation and officially changed its name to the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema (SNC; National Film School). However, in 2004, as a result of a concerted campaign of protest by its staff and other stakeholders, further legislation restored its original name without abrogating its function as both a national film school and film library. Following developments in the last 15 years, what is now the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia comprises the SNC, based in Rome but with branches in Turin, Milan, Palermo, and Aquila; the Cineteca Nazionale (National Cinematheque), co-located in the Centro’s historic building in Rome with the Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini (Luigi Chiarini Library); a publishing arm that continues to issue the journal Bianco e nero as well as publishing other selected volumes on Italian cinema; and, since 2008, a subsidiary production company, CSC Production, that facilitates the Center’s students making and distributing their films. The CSC thus remains Italy’s most prestigious film institute. Teachers and graduates of the Centro over the years have included all the major directors, actors, writers, and technicians formerly or presently working in the Italian film industry. The Centro can also vaunt many foreign writers and filmmakers among its graduates, the most illustrious, perhaps, being the Nobel Prize–winning journalist and writer Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez, who, after studying at the Centro in 1955, was instrumental in establishing the International Film School in Cuba. CERAMI, VINCENZO (1940–2013). Novelist, poet, playwright, actor, and screenwriter. Cerami always expressed his gratitude at having been introduced to literature in high school by his then teacher, Pier Paolo Pasolini. He nevertheless enrolled in physics at the University of Rome but soon abandoned it in order to pursue writing. After working as assistant director on Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964) and Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966), he collaborated on the scripts of a half dozen Spaghetti Westerns before penning the screenplay for Mario Monicelli’s Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977), adapted from his own highly acclaimed novel of the same name. He subsequently cowrote the screenplays for many important films by major directors, including Marco Bellocchio’s Salto nel vuoto (A Leap in the Dark, 1980) and Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth, 1982), Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Segreti segreti (Secrets Secrets, 1985) and I cammelli (The Camels, 1988), and three of Gianni Amelio’s early films, Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1982), I ragazzi di via Panisperna (The Boys on Panisperna Street, 1989), and Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990), which received an

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Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. Cerami’s closest working relationship, however, was with Roberto Benigni, with whom he cowrote Il piccolo diavolo (The Little Devil, 1988), Johnny Stecchino (Johnny Toothpick, 1991), Il mostro (The Monster, 1994), La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997)— which earned both of them an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay—and, in the new millennium, Pinocchio (2002) and La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005). As well as writing and sometimes acting in his own plays, Cerami also long collaborated with musician-composer Nicola Piovani in the creation and performance of musical drama and operettas. His last screenplay was for the directorial debut of his son, Matteo Cerami, titled Tutti a mare (All at Sea, 2011), something of a sequel to Casotto, a beachside cavalcade that Cerami had written in 1977 for director Sergio Citti. CERVI, GINO (1901–1974). Actor. A prolific and popular actor who appeared in more than 100 Italian films, Cervi began his career on the stage in 1924 in the company of Aida Borelli (sister of the diva Lyda Borelli). A decade later, he had become the leading male actor in the Tofano-Maltagliati theater company. His first film appearance was in Gennaro Righelli’s L’armata azzurra (The Blue Fleet, 1932), following which he starred in many of Alessandro Blasetti’s most popular films: he was the heroic knight who embodies Italian courage and chivalry in Ettore Fieramosca (1938), the dashing righter of wrongs and defender of ordinary people in Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvator Rosa, 1939), the evil king Sedemondo in La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), and the affable traveling salesman Paolo Bianchi in Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942). He also played a very creditable Renzo in Mario Camerini’s adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic 19th-century historical novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1941). After the war, he became best known for playing Peppone, the Communist mayor, opposite Fernandel, the belligerent parish priest, in five of the extremely successful Don Camillo films, beginning with Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1952), directed by Julien Duvivier, and concluding with Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965), directed by Luigi Comencini. By then, he was achieving even greater popularity playing Inspector Maigret in the long-running RAI television series Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (The Investigations of Commissioner Maigret, 1964–1972). His interpretation of the famous sleuth was praised by no less than the creator of the character himself, Georges Simenon. After playing the saintly monk Don Lino in Pino Tosini’s Fratello ladro (Brother Thief, 1972), Cervi’s last film appearance was in Tosini’s adaptation of a scurrilous story by the Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino, titled I racconti romani di una ex novizia (The Roman Tales of a Former Novice, 1973).

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CHIARI, WALTER (1924–1991). Actor. After being a keen sportsman in his teens and showing a great deal of promise as a boxer, Walter Chiari, born Walter Annichiarico, began working in theater in 1946. While displaying a natural talent for stage reviews and musical theater, he also made his first film appearance in Giorgio Pastina’s Vanità (Vanity, 1947), for which he received a Nastro d’argento for Best Acting Debut. From then on, he alternated between stage and screen, starring in dozens of light romantic comedies, some written especially for him, but also giving more nuanced dramatic performances, as in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951). His popularity continued to grow, and by the early 1960s, he had achieved something of an international reputation, having appeared in films such as Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse (1958) as well as on American television on The Steve Allen Show (1957) and The Ed Sullivan Show (1961). After playing the wryly cynical protagonist of Alessandro Blasetti’s Io, io, io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966) and Mr. Silence in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), he was memorable as Nino, the hapless Italian journalist who migrates to Australia, in Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob (1966). However, in May 1970, still at the crest of his popularity, he was arrested and jailed for several months on charges of using and supplying cocaine. Although he was eventually acquitted of the supply charge, his career subsequently went into a severe decline. He began making a comeback in the mid-1980s, especially after the screening on national television of a seven-part documentary on his life, produced by film critic and historian Tatti Sanguineti. That same year his performance as the father in Massimo Mazzucco’s Romanzo (Romance, 1986) was highly acclaimed and tipped by many to bring him the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. After playing a minor role in the television miniseries I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1989), he made his final appearance in one of the stories of Peter Del Monte’s Tracce di vita amorosa (Traces of an Amorous Life, 1990). In 2012, Casanova Multimedia produced a two-part television miniseries on the actor’s life and times, starring Alessio Boni as Chiari. CHIARINI, LUIGI (1900–1975). Film theorist, teacher, and director. A noted intellectual and a strong advocate of state support for the film industry, Chiarini was appointed as founding director of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1935 and was largely responsible for its subsequent success and prestige as a national film school. In 1937, he founded the Centro’s journal, Bianco e nero, and continued as its editor for many years. Between 1952 and 1955, he also edited the Rivista del cinema italiano and, in 1961, was appointed to the first Italian chair of cinema studies at the University of Pisa. From 1964 to 1968, he also served as executive director of the Venice Festival.

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As well as publishing widely on film theory and practice—ideas that he attempted to summarize in the formula “film is an art, cinema is an industry”—Chiarini collaborated with a fellow teacher at the Centro, Umberto Barbaro, on training films such as L’attore (The Actor, 1939). In the 1940s, he also directed a handful of feature films that, perhaps unfairly, were then, and have continued to be, generally more coldly respected than warmly admired: Via delle Cinque Lune (Five Moon Street, 1942), adapted from a short story by Matilde Serrao; La bella addormentata (Sleeping Beauty, 1942); La locandiera (Mirandolina, 1944), a realistic transposition of the 18th-century play of the same name by Carlo Goldoni; Ultimo amore (Last Love, 1947); and Patto col diavolo (Pact with the Devil, 1950). His memory, nevertheless, continues to be honored in the Centro’s print library, which still bears his name. CICOGNINI, ALESSANDRO (1906–1995). Composer. Trained at the Conservatory of Milan and with an established reputation as a classical composer, Cicognini began working in the cinema in the mid-1930s, his first credited score being for Amleto Palermi’s Il corsaro nero (The Black Corsair, 1938). He subsequently scored all of Alessandro Blasetti’s films from Ettore Fieramosca (1938) to Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942), as well as Augusto Genina’s Castelli in aria (Castles in the Air, 1939) and Mario Camerini’s I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939). In the immediate postwar period, he established a particularly strong association with Vittorio De Sica, composing the music for all of De Sica’s major films from the Oscar-nominated Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) to Il tetto (The Roof, 1956), distinguishing himself especially with the score for Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), which brought him a Nastro d’argento. Versatile and wide ranging, he also collaborated with Julien Duvivier on Il piccolo mondo di Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1952) and Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953); with Camerini again on several films, including the big-budget mythological epic Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954); and most successfully perhaps on Luigi Comencini’s enormously popular Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953). He also worked with several international directors, notably with David Lean on Summertime (1955) and Michael Curtiz on A Breath of Scandal (1960) before retiring from composing for film in the early 1960s in order to pursue a career in teaching. CINECITTÀ. Studio complex. Housing 16 well-equipped studios spread over an area of 400,000 square meters, Cinecittà (Cinema City) was projected as the largest and most important film production facility in Italy. Ostensibly built by the owner of the Cines, Carlo Roncoroni, as a replace-

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ment for the studios in Via Veio that had mysteriously burned down in 1935, the project was largely financed by the Fascist government and officially opened by Benito Mussolini on 28 April 1937 as a sign of solid state support for the languishing film industry. Originally managed privately, the complex was assumed by the state in 1939 under the directorship of former head of the General Directorate of Cinematography, Luigi Freddi. As expected, the new facility dramatically raised national production, with some 300 films being made there before the later part of 1943 when, following Italy’s declaration of the armistice, the studios were ransacked by retreating Fascist troops with the intention of setting up a cinevillaggio (film village) in Venice. Many of the films produced at Cinecittà during the Fascist period were undoubtedly light comedies in the so-called white telephone mode, but films like Alessandro Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942) and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), both regarded as forerunners of Neorealism, were also made with the studio’s facilities. The war took its toll on the complex, which was significantly damaged by Allied bombing, and after liberation, the studios came to be used as a camp for displaced persons by the Allied forces. By the early 1950s, however, the studios had been completely restored, and established directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini and up-and-coming directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini began to make extensive use of them, Fellini’s particular predilection for Studio Five becoming legendary. Taking advantage of an Italian law that obliged foreign film companies to reinvest a portion of their profits in Italy, many of the major American major studios also began to produce some of their big-budget spectacles at Cinecittà, thus earning it, for a period, the epithet of Hollywood on the Tiber. By the late 1970s, however, as a result of a general downturn in the film industry, production at Cinecittà fell alarmingly, leading to rumors of a closure. Fortunately, a reprieve appeared with an increase in production for television, which helped to financially support the complex through the 1980s. In the early 1990s, a concerted attempt was made to revive the flagging fortunes of the studios with the establishment of the state-owned company Cinecittà International, which was meant to promote Italian films in the international market. Nevertheless, the new company continued to lose money and so was liquidated in 1996. Two years later, Cinecittà itself was privatized but with a controlling share reserved for the newly established Cinecittà Holding, a company under the direct control of the Treasury (reassigned a year later to the Ministry for Culture). After languishing in private hands for almost a decade, in 2017 the studios were brought back under public control when reacquired by the newly constituted Istituto LUCE-Cinecittà (ILC), a move made possible by the new comprehensive so-called Franceschini Law passed earlier in the year. With a view not only to reviving but also actively renewing the studio complex, the

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ILC immediately instituted a plan for the construction of two new 35,000square-meter sound studios (one green screen and one with underwater filming facilities), an interactive Audiovisual and Cinema Museum, an improved Cinecittà Digital Factory with state-of-the-art postproduction and restoration facilities, a video game production hub, a training school, an Erasmus residence, and better marketing of the studios’ entertainment district, Cinecittà World. The three-year plan has been currently activated, and reports are that production at the studios has already increased significantly. See also L’UNIONE CINEMATOGRAFICA EDUCATIVA (LUCE; UNION OF EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY). CINEMA. Journal. Founded in 1936 and published bimonthly, Cinema soon became one of the most important reference points for film culture in Fascist Italy. Despite being directed from 1938 to 1943 by Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio, the journal was host to a relatively wide range of opinions and included in its ranks not only left-wing critics but also clandestine members of the banned Italian Communist Party. Although its general tendency was to voice strong support for a national cinema, there was no attempt to hide an obvious admiration for Hollywood films, with Vittorio Mussolini himself expressing opposition to the 1938 monopoly law, introduced by his father, on the grounds that hundreds of American films would no longer find their way to Italian screens. Nevertheless, from 1941 onward, a group of militant young critics, congregating around the figure of Giuseppe De Santis, began to use the pages of the journal to call for a greater sense of realism in Italian films, taking as their model the 19th-century Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga. It was this group that eventually collaborated with Luchino Visconti in producing what they regarded as something of a manifesto of this new sort of cinema, Ossessione (1943). After being interrupted by World War II, the journal resumed publication in 1948, again providing a range of perspectives on a variety of topics, including cinema and censorship, film audiences, and a number of special issues dedicated to a reappraisal of the work of veteran directors such as Mario Camerini and Alessandro Blasetti. However, as time went on, it hosted fewer theoretical essays and became more of a film magazine. After initiating a third series in mid-1955, it ceased publication in 1956. CINEPANETTONE. Genre. This term has come to be generically applied in the last 20 years or so to a series of frothy comedies, mostly released annually in the Christmas holiday period and thus functioning like the filmic equivalent of panettone, the Italian cake ritually consumed during the holiday period. The generic affiliation of the majority of films usually ranged under the rubric is patently signalled by the appearance of the word Christmas itself

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in the title, coupled with either vacation or the specification of a location. Given that the films tend to play in the register of comic farce, their humor is often willfully sexist, vulgar, and politically incorrect, leading to their critical reception having been generally dismissive, when not decidedly hostile, even though they have usually attracted huge audiences and netted top box office. In more recent times, however, their significant contribution to bolstering the fortunes of the Italian film industry in difficult times has come to be more seriously acknowledged, and film historians have also reevaluated their historical and cultural significance. The genre is widely held to have begun with Carlo Vanzina’s Vacanze di Natale (Christmas Vacation, 1983) even though Camillo Mastrocinque’s Vacanze d’inverno (Winter Holidays, 1959) is often cited as a precursor. Although Vanzina proceeded to develop the Italians-on-holiday-in-an-exoticlocation formula in his subsequent Vacanze in America (Holidays in America, 1984), Enrico Oldoini reinstated the Christmas component in his Vacanze di Natale ’90 (Christmas Vacation ’90, 1990) and Vacanze di Natale ’91 (Christmas Vacation ’91, 1991). Three years later, Neri Parenti made his first foray into the genre with his Vacanze di Natale ’95 (Christmas Vacation ’95, 1995). He returned to it in 2001 with Merry Christmas and thereafter made it his own with Natale sul Nilo (Christmas on the Nile, 2002), Natale in India (Christmas in India, 2003), Christmas in Love (2004), Natale a Miami (Christmas in Miami, 2005), Natale a New York (Christmas in New York, 2006), Natale in Crociera (Christmas Cruise, 2007), Natale a Rio (Christmas in Rio, 2008), Natale a Beverley Hills (Christmas in Beverley Hills, 2009), Natale in Sud Africa (Christmas in South Africa, 2010), and Vacanze di Natale a Cortina (Christmas Holidays in Cortina, 2011). While the genre employed a number of regular writers and actors to create its stylistic consistency, at its core, until more recent times, was the enduring partnership that developed between actors Christian De Sica and Massimo Bondi, who made 23 films together, most of which are usually considered under the rubric. The duo parted ways in 2005 but, after having played out a very public rivalry for the crown of comedy for 13 years, teamed up again in 2018 in order to make Amici come prima (Friends as Before, 2018), a film that many have seen as marking a relaunch of the genuine cinepanettone. CINES. Production company. The studio that would remain one of the pillars of the Italian film industry during its first half century, albeit with a number of near deaths and resuscitations, Cines was born in April 1906 out of Alberini & Santoni, the company with which Filoteo Alberini produced what is generally regarded as the first Italian narrative film, La presa di Roma (The Taking of Rome, 1905). With the backing of the Bank of Rome and expertise from a number of technicians poached from the French Pathé, Cines rapidly expanded to become the foremost film production company in

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Italy, turning out a weekly supply of commercial films. Under the guidance of Mario Caserini, who had joined the company as an actor in 1905 but had quickly taken the reins as artistic director, the company produced films across a wide variety of genres, from “actualities,” documentaries, and hundreds of sketches by its resident comic, Ferdinand Guillame, alias Tontolini, to historical costume dramas and literary and theatrical adaptations. From 1910 onward, it achieved a special reputation for colossal Greco-Roman epics and ancient world spectacles such as Brutus (1910), Messalina (1910), La sposa del Nilo (The Bride of the Nile, 1911), Quo vadis? (1913), and Marcantonio e Cleopatra (Anthony and Cleopatra, 1913), all directed by painter-turned-director Enrico Guazzoni. By 1911, run by a board of management headed by Baron Alberto Fassini that included the cream of Roman nobility and industry, Cines was exporting its films all over the world, with subsidiaries in Paris, London, Barcelona, Moscow, and Berlin, and offices in New York, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Yokohama, and Hong Kong. Nevertheless, after a decade of almost unmitigated success during which it had produced more than 1,500 films and achieved international renown, the Cines suffered, along with all the other companies, in the crisis that engulfed the Italian film industry in the period immediately following World War I. In 1919, together with most of the other major Italian studios, it merged into the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI; Italian Cinematographic Union), a consortium headed, for a period, by Baron Fassini himself. Poor overall management and a retrograde policy of too many costly remakes of Roman epics, which had made the fortune of the industry a decade earlier but were no longer commercially viable, led to the collapse of the UCI and of the Cines with it. By the mid-1920s, the company’s Roman studios in Via Veio were either inactive or hired out to foreign companies. The company received a new lease on life when entrepreneur Stefano Pittaluga bought up the UCI’s assets in 1926 and, with great intelligence and foresight, began to renew the old Cines studios, equipping them with Photophone RCA sound recording equipment. The new Cines, with Pittaluga as general manager, was officially inaugurated in May 1930 by the minister for corporations, Giuseppe Bottai, indicating a new willingness on the part of the Fascist government to support the Italian film industry. The farsighted Pittaluga immediately began to invite directors like Alessandro Blasetti, who had remained in Italy, and others such as Guido Brignone and Gennaro Righelli, who had left to work abroad, to join the company and to utilize its studios. Beginning with the first Italian sound film, La canzone dell’amore (The Song of Love, 1930), directed by Gennaro Righelli—the first sound film actually shot was Resurrectio, directed by Blasetti, but it was not released until 1931—the Cines studios became the center of Italian sound film production in the early 1930s.

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Pittaluga’s untimely death in 1931, at the age of 44, led to the artistic direction of the company being entrusted to Emilio Cecchi. A literary critic, poet, translator, and art historian who had become fascinated with cinema while teaching in America, Cecchi encouraged all sorts of quality films at Cines, with a special place reserved for documentaries (which to this point had been the exclusive province of the Istituto LUCE). Under Cecchi’s guidance, the Cines experienced a golden period, producing a long series of fine documentaries and several landmark feature films, the most notable being Blasetti’s 1860 (Gesuzza, the Garibaldian Wife, 1933), a film about Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign and his decisive victory at the battle of Calatifimi. A number of foreign directors also came to work at the Cines, such as the German director Walter Ruttmann, who directed Acciaio (Steel, 1933), and Max Ophüls, who made the much-acclaimed La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman) at the Cines studios in 1934. Nevertheless, by 1934 Cecchi had left the studio to continue to pursue his literary interests. Ludovico Toeplitz had also resigned as general director, and competition from a number of other studios that had been established in the meantime had begun to undermine the studio’s viability. For a brief period, control of the company passed into the hands of industrialist Carlo Roncoroni, who nurtured plans of building a larger and more modern studio complex. However, on the night of 26 September 1935 a mysterious fire destroyed much of the studio’s facilities. In the wake of the disaster, Roncoroni accepted a proposal from Luigi Freddi, head of the government’s newly established Direzione Generale della Cinematografia, regarding a project that would result, only two years later, in the new studio complex of Cinecittà, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini in person. With the opening of Cinecittà, Cines and its studios were downgraded and either ceased production or were rented out to other companies. In 1942, the Cines was reconstituted under state control and its studios used to make a number of films, the most significant being Mario Bonnard’s Avanti c’è posto (Before the Postman, 1942). However, following Italy’s signing of the armistice in November 1943, many of the facilities were dismantled and appropriated by retreating Fascist forces, with the intention of setting up a new center of film production in Venice. In the postwar period, the Cines was reconstituted as a state-owned company in 1949 and was home to a significant number of productions and coproductions, including Pietro Germi’s Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Brigand of Tacca del Lupo, 1952) and Blasetti’s Altri tempi (Times Gone By, 1952) and Tempi nostri (The Anatomy of Love, 1954). However, with increased competition from Cinecittà and a host of new companies and studios, the Cines was definitively closed in 1956, drawing the curtain on a long and illustrious history.

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CIPRÌ, DANIELE (1962–). Cinematographer, screenwriter, director, editor, and playwright. A cineaste from his earliest days, Ciprì began his career in films as a photographer in his native Palermo (Sicily), filming weddings and other social events. At the same time, he also began making documentaries with the CLCT Cooperative headed by Giuseppe Tornatore. A developing friendship with Franco Maresco in the mid-1980s led to their teaming up to make experimental short films together for the local TV station, TVM. Their work gradually began to attract wider attention, and in the wake of their short Seicortosei (1991) winning the Golden Seagull at the Bellaria Film Festival, they were invited to be regulars on the RAI national television’s Blob and Dopo orari late-night film programs. It was there that the anarchic and surreal short films, which they presented under the rubric of Cinico TV, came to attract a cult audience. Their provocative, seemingly spontaneous interactive interviews with odd (and always) male characters of their native Palermo, played by nonprofessional actors and filmed in high-contrast black and white against usually desolate and dilapidated urban landscapes, soon came to be widely appreciated as fragments of a profoundly creative auteur cinema of social critique and earned the duo a national reputation as innovative experimental filmmakers. By 1995, their growing notoriety allowed them to finance their first feature, Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn, 1995). Very much in the style of their Cinico TV, and using many of the same characters and motifs, the film presented a picture of Palermo as a postapocalyptic urban and moral wasteland, its fragmented narrative of a family obliged to host a mysterious uncle from Brooklyn a clear allusion to the Mafia wars that were continuing to devastate the city. Despite, or perhaps on account of, its visionary nihilism, brilliantly conveyed by Luca Bigazzi’s high-contrast black-and-white photography, the film won the Casa Rossa Prize at the Bellaria Festival, and Ciprì and Maresco were nominated for the Nastro d’argento as Best Emerging Directors. Three years later, they were able to direct their second feature, Totò che visse due volte (Toto Who Lived Twice, 1998). Also created in the provocative and iconoclastic style of Cinico TV, the film screened without incident at the Berlin International Film Festival, but its planned theatrical release in Italy came to be blocked by the censors on charges of blasphemy and offence to public morals. The film’s distributor, Lucky Red, mounted a strong appeal, and the film was eventually given a theatrical release but only for audiences over 18. Ironically, as well as creating greater publicity for the film, the censor’s intervention only served to hasten the abolition of the censorship system altogether. Undeterred, the duo also continued to nurture their parallel love of jazz music with several music documentaries, including Steve Plays Duke (1999), a portrait of jazz pianist Steve Lacy, and Miles Gloriosus (2001), a celebration of legendary trumpeter Miles Davis. At the same time, having acquired a reputation as a first-rate cinematographer, Ciprì also began working with other

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directors, establishing a particularly fertile professional relationship with Roberta Torre for whom he photographed all the early films, from her debut feature, Tano da morire (To Die for Tano, 1997), to Mare nero (The Dark Sea, 2006). Moving slightly more toward mainstream, Ciprì and Maresco’s third feature, Il ritorno di Cagliosto (The Return of Cagliostro, 2003), was a hilarious tongue-in-cheek story about two brothers attempting (and failing) in the immediate postwar period to single-handedly revive the ancient glories of the Sicilian film industry. This was followed by Come inguaiammo il cinema italiano: La vera storia di Franco e Ciccio (How We Got the Italian Movie Business into Trouble: The True Story of Franco and Ciccio, 2004), a documentary on the life and work of the famous comic duo Ciccio Ingrassia and Franco Franchi, whose myriad films in the 1960s and 1970s had been so popular but also so critically maligned, somewhat like the Ciprì and Maresco duo itself. After two further television series in the style of Cinico TV—i migliori nani della nostra vita (2006, six episodes) and Ai limiti della pietà (At the Limits of Pity, 2007, six episodes)—and a number of other documentaries, including Il testamento di Monicelli (Monicelli’s Will, 2010), the pair amicably separated. Two years later, Ciprì directed his first solo feature, È stato il figlio (It Was the Son, 2012), a comedy that begins and ends in tragedy when a family of humble scrap dealers in Palermo successfully accesses a large sum of money as reparation for the accidental death of their young daughter in the crossfire of a Mafia shoot-out. His second feature, La buca (The Hole, 2014), was similarly a black comedy recounting the efforts of a lawyer of dubious morals to help a meek individual who has served a long prison sentence for a murder he didn’t commit to mount a successful legal case for financial reparation. At the same time, having come to be much in demand, Ciprì began to work in earnest as a cinematographer. His superb photography on Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009) earned him a host of prizes, including both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento, leading to his working as cinematographer on Bellocchio’s subsequent Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty, 2012), Sangue del mio sangue (Blood of My Blood, 2015), and Fai bei sogni (Sweet Dreams, 2016); Fai bei sogni brought him further nominations for both the David and Nastro d’argento. Having never received any formal training in filmmaking, in 2018 he was awarded an honorary diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While teaching at Rome’s Griffith Academy of Film and Television, Ciprì most recently also has been awarded the Nastro d’argento for his cinematography on both Matteo Rovere’s Il primo re (Romulus and Remus: The First King, 2019) and Claudio Giovannesi’s La paranza dei bambini (Piranhas, 2019). See also CENSORSHIP.

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CIPRÌ E MARESCO. See CIPRÌ, DANIELE (1962–); MARESCO, FRANCO (1958–). CITTI, FRANCO (1935–2016). Actor. A house painter from one of the shanty towns on the outskirts of Rome, with little education and no formal experience of any aspect of filmmaking, Citti was chosen by Pier Paolo Pasolini to play the title role of his debut film, Accattone (Accattone!, 1961). Citti’s extraordinary presence and compelling performance in the film led to further lead roles in Pasolini’s subsequent Mamma Roma (1962) and Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1966), as well as major supporting parts in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1970), I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1971), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1973). However, despite a common tendency to value him exclusively for his ubiquitous presence in Pasolini’s cinema, Citti went on, in a long and fruitful career, to appear in some 60 other films and TV series, ranging from roles in Spaghetti Westerns like Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (1967) and Enzo G. Castellari’s Ammazzali tutti e torna solo (Kill Them All and Come Back Alone, 1968) to playing the psychopathic leader of a motorcycle gang in Brunello Rondi’s Ingrid sulla strada (Macadam Jungle, 1963) and Aldo Moro’s driver in Elio Petri’s Todo modo (1978). Indeed, even while appearing in Pasolini’s films, he also frequently worked with other directors, providing one of his most intense and moving performances as Oreste, one of three prisoners tortured by the Belgian military, in Valerio Zurlini’s Seduto alla sua destra (Black Jesus, 1968). Four years later, he played Calo in the Sicilian sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), a role he would later reprise in Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III (1990). At the same time, having already made one brief foray into theater in 1964, taking on the part of John the Baptist in Carmelo Bene’s iconoclastic production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, in 1978 he played Juan in Marco Ferreri’s adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma. After also appearing in many of the films written and directed by his elder brother, Sergio Citti, including Ostia (1970), Storie scellerate (Bawdy Tales, 1973), Casotto (Big House, 1978), Il minestrone (1981), and in several episodes of Sogni e bisogni (Dreams and Needs), the miniseries Sergio Citti wrote and directed for the RAI in 1985, he also made one attempt at writing and directing himself, aided by his brother, in Cartoni animati (Cartoons, 1997). A series of minor strokes he suffered soon after, however, led him to withdraw from filmmaking. Although not a writer by natural inclination, in 1992 he published (with Claudio Valentini) an autobiography appropriately titled Vita di un ragazzo di vita (Life of a Ragazzo).

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CITTI, SERGIO (1933–2005). Screenwriter and director. Born and bred in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Rome, Citti worked as a housepainter until 1954 when a fortuitous encounter with Pier Paolo Pasolini resulted in his being engaged as a language consultant to vet the sub-proletarian slang that Pasolini was seeking to utilize in his novels I ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959). Thanks to Pasolini’s connections within the Roman film scene, Citti was soon also working as a language consultant on a host of other films set in the sub-proletarian world of the borgate such as Federico Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) and Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (The Big Night, 1959) and La giornata balorda (From a Roman Balcony, 1960). Having served as assistant on “La ricotta” (“Curd Cheese”), the episode Pasolini contributed to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), Citti then worked as assistant director on all of Pasolini’s subsequent films, including the notorious Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), for which Citti also collaborated on the screenplay. While continuing to work as assistant to Pasolini, Citti made his own directorial debut in 1970 with Ostia. Over the next three decades, he wrote and directed another dozen films, among them Storie scellerate (Bawdy Tales, 1973), Casotto (Beach House, 1977), Due pezzi di pane (Two Pieces of Bread, 1979), Il minestrone (1981), Mortacci (Death to You, 1989), Vipera (Viper, 2000), and Fratella e sorello (2004), in all of which he displayed a very distinctive rough-hewn poetic style that hostile critics pejoratively, and arguably myopically, characterized as “mongrel cinema.” In 1985, he also turned to television to direct Sogni e bisogni (Dreams and Needs), a very popular 12-part miniseries for the national broadcaster, RAI, which ably engaged the talents of, among others, Giulietta Masina, Ugo Tognazzi, Carlo Verdone, Paolo Villaggio, Gigi Proietti, and Sergio’s own brother, Franco Citti. Critically underappreciated for much of his artistic life and mistakenly regarded as a mere acolyte of Pasolini, in 1996 Citti received a nomination for the Nastro d’argento as Best Director for I Magi randagi (We Free Kings, 1996), a charming and very poetic modern rendition of the story of the three Magi of the New Testament wandering in a quest to find the newborn Jesus. Three years later, his significant contribution to Italian cinema finally began to be recognized with the publication of an anthology of critical appraisals of all his films, titled, in homage to his typical modesty, Mi chiamo Sergio Citti, racconto storie (My Name Is Sergio Citti, I Tell Stories, 1999). COLORADO FILM. Production company. An independent production company formed in 1986 by director Gabriele Salvatores, actor Diego Abatantuono, and independent producer Maurizio Totti, Colorado Film has in its three decades of operation produced, either alone or in partnership, some 30

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feature films. These have included features by established directors such as Salvatores and Giuseppe Bertolucci but also a number of films by younger and relatively unknown directors such as Antonello Grimaldi, Alessandro Cappelletti, and Stefano Reali. In 1997, the company also opened an advertising branch, Colorado Commercials, which became an independent company in 2003. In 2004, Colorado Film established a publishing arm, Colorado Noir, with the aim of encouraging new crime fiction that could eventually be adapted for cinema. The first novel published by Colorado Noir, Grazia Verasani’s Quo vadis, baby? (2004), was directed for the screen by Salvatores, in a coproduction between Colorado and Silvio Berlusconi’s Medusa, and later reprised as the basis for a six-part television series of the same name, directed by Guido Chiesa. Colorado Film is now the film and television production arm of Iven S.p.A. group, which includes the talent agency Moviement and the San Isidro Music publishing company. It maintains its own website at http://www.coloradofilm.it. COMENCINI, CRISTINA (1956–). Director, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Second eldest daughter of veteran director Luigi Comencini, Cristina made an early appearance on the screen as a teenager in one of her father’s films but chose to study economics at university and work briefly as a researcher in the field before being drawn back to collaborate with her father on the screenplays of several of his television features, including Cuore (Heart, 1984) and La storia (History, 1986). In 1988, she made her own directorial debut with the quirky children’s film Zoo (1988). This was followed by I divertimenti della vita privata (The Amusements of Private Life, 1990), an elegant costume drama with feminist undertones set in revolutionary France; La fine è nota (The End Is Known, 1993), a thriller based on a novel by Geoffrey Holiday Hall; and a very successful adaptation of Susanna Tamara’s best-selling novel Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart, 1996). At the same time, she pursued her literary interests and published a series of successful novels, among them Le pagine strappate (The Missing Pages, 1991), Passione di famiglia (Family Passion, 1994), and Il cappotto del turco (The Turk’s Overcoat, 1997). She returned to the cinema with the boisterous, bittersweet comedy Matrimoni (Marriages, 1998), which was followed by what many regard as her finest film, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life, 2001), an intense family drama filtered through the eyes of a young girl preparing for her first Holy Communion. In 2005, La bestia nel cuore (The Beast in the Heart / Don’t Tell, 2005), another considerably darker family drama dealing with the theme of pedophilia and adapted from Comencini’s own novel of the same name, competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival and was subsequently put forward as the Italian nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years later, she decided to widen her scope to the theater, writing and directing Due

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partite (Two Games), a two-act play in which two sets of four women meet to play cards and discuss their lives. She returned to cinema with Bianco e nero (Black and White 2008), the story of an adulterous affair between a white Italian male and a Senegalese woman, which, as well as continuing her investigation of married couples and their discontents, also attempted to engage, if only lightly, with the issue of racism. Also adapted from her previously published novel, Quando la notte (When the Night, 2011) elicited a hostile critical reception when screened at Venice, although it subsequently found more favorable audiences in cinemas. She nevertheless returned to critical favor and form with Latin Lover (2015), the story of another comically fraught family reunion, this time of the wife and five daughters of the deceased famous actor and Latin lover of the title, which, while delving further into the labyrinth of both marital and father-daughter relations, also managed to frame a warm tribute to the popular, and male-centered, Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Nominated for four David di Donatello awards, it also garnered Comencini a Special Nastro d’argento for her direction. A year later, the frothy comedy, Qualcosa di nuovo (Something New, 2016), based on La scena (The Scene), a play she had written and directed for the stage in 2013, pushed further Comencini’s exploration of female sexuality and desire, a topic she subsequently investigated from another angle in Sex Story (2019), a documentary using only found footage, highlighting the strongly sexual but servile images of women, which had been a staple of RAI national television during its first 35 years. COMENCINI, FRANCESCA (1961–). Director and screenwriter. Daughter of veteran director Luigi Comencini (and sister of Cristina and Paola, who also work in the film industry), Francesca Comencini abandoned her university studies in Italy and moved to France, where she soon directed her first feature, Pianoforte (1984). Telling the story of a young couple in love but continually struggling to overcome their drug addiction, the film earned her the De Sica Prize for young directors when screened at the Venice Festival. After collaborating with her father on the screenplay of Un ragazzo di Calabria (The Boy from Calabria, 1987), she directed two more features in France, La lumière du lac (The Light of the Lake, 1988) and Annabelle partagée (Annabelle Divided, 1991), before again working with her father on his remake of the children’s classic Marcellino pane e vino (Miracle of Marcellino, 1991). She subsequently made a number of documentaries for French television before directing Le parole di mio padre (The Words of My Father, 2001), a loose but interesting adaptation of Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno). This was followed by Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo (Carlo Giuliani, Boy, 2002), a documentary about the young man killed by police at Genoa in 2001 during the violent protests against the G8 and globalization.

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She then directed her fifth feature, Mi piace lavorare—Mobbing (I Like to Work—Mobbing, 2004), a very socially committed film in which Nicoletta Braschi plays a single mother working in the corporate environment, subjected to the abusive practice of “mobbing.” The film was highly praised, earning Nicoletta Braschi a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress and itself winning the Special Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlin International Festival. Two years later, the ironically titled A casa nostra (Our Country, 2006) was an effectively crafted thriller set in the murky world of Milanese high finance. In the same year, she returned again to look at the work environment in the made-for-television documentary In fabbrica (In the Factory, 2007) before directing her seventh feature, Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, 2009), an almost analytical study of the anguished journey of a single mother through the blank space and time between giving birth to a premature baby at six months and only learning definitively whether the child would survive or die two months later. Margherita Buy was awarded the Pasinetti Prize at Venice for her extraordinary performance in the film, and Comencini received both the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub) Prize and the Pasinetti Award for Best Film. Two years later, Un giorno speciale (A Special Day, 2012) saw a profound relationship develop between an aspiring young actress and the young man hired to drive her to a meeting with a corrupt politician who may be able to further her career in television. There followed an abrupt change of tack with Comencini directing 15 episodes of what would become the long-running television series Gomorra—la serie (Gormorrah, the Series, 2014–2019). In between episodes of Gomorrah, she managed to also direct her ninth feature, Amori che non sanno stare al mondo (Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World, 2017), a romantic “dramedy,” as Anglo-Saxon critics characterized it, about love and its entanglements among the over-50s. COMENCINI, LUIGI (1916–2007). Director and screenwriter. Although often characterized almost exclusively as one of the leading practitioners of the commedia all’italiana, Comencini was a very eclectic and versatile director whose production ranged widely from murder mysteries and family dramas to the farcical comedies of Totò. The two most constant features of his filmmaking, however, were a wry sense of humor and an abiding interest in children and their view of the world. Comencini began writing film criticism while an architecture student in Milan. An early passion for collecting and preserving old films led to a conservation project, carried out with fellow students Alberto Lattuada and Mario Ferrari, which eventually resulted in the establishment of the Italian Cinematheque. After World War II, he again worked as a film critic until he was able to finance Bambini in città (Children in the City, 1946), a documentary about street kids in Milan living in the midst of the city’s war ruins.

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The work was highly praised when it was screened at both the Venice Festival and Cannes and earned him his first Nastro d’argento. It also brought an offer from Carlo Ponti at Lux Film to produce his first feature, Proibito rubare (No Stealing, also known as Guagliò, 1948), a sort of Boys Town set in Naples. The film’s unfortunate lack of either critical or box office success prompted Comencini to accept a commission to direct one of Totò’s early films, L’imperatore di Capri (The Emperor of Capri, 1949). This lighthearted farce was followed by the very different Persiane chiuse (Behind Closed Shutters, 1951) and La tratta delle bianche (The White Slave Trade, 1952), two dark social melodramas centered on crime and prostitution, both clearly influenced by American film noir. On the strength of his earlier work with children, Comencini was next invited to Switzerland to direct an adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s classic childhood novel Heidi (1953), although the film proved a dismal box office failure. Comencini’s fortunes would improve immeasurably, however, with his next film, Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), a rural idyll starring Vittorio De Sica and the budding Gina Lollobrigida in the role of the beautiful country bumpkin that first brought her to public attention. The film was such an unexpected and overwhelming box office success that it immediately prompted Comencini to make its equally popular sequel, Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky). More gentle social satire followed in La bella di Roma (The Belle of Rome, 1955), Mariti in città (Husbands in the City, 1957), and Mogli pericolose (Dangerous Wives, 1958) before Comencini made what many regard as one of his finest films, Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960). In the biting satirical register of what had by now become known as the commedia all’italiana, the film presented a disconcerting portrait of the chaotic aftermath of Italy’s abrupt armistice with the Allies in September 1943, with Alberto Sordi providing one of his most endearing and moving performances as the hapless Lieutenant Innocenzi. After two other caustic comedies set in contemporary Italy, A cavallo della tigre (On the Tiger’s Back, 1960) and Il commissario (The Police Commissioner, 1962), Comencini returned to the war period in more dramatic terms with his adaption of Carlo Cassola’s famous Resistance novel La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl, 1963). He then agreed to direct the fifth in the series of Don Camillo films, Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965), largely in order to be able to finance L’incompreso (Misunderstood, 1967), another film with children at its center, which earned him his first David di Donatello as well as a nomination for the Palme d’or. Bowing once again to commercial pressures, he next produced a spoof of the spy film then so much in vogue with Italian Secret Service (1968) and the taut murder thriller Senza sapere nulla di lei (Without Knowing Anything about Her, 1969) before returning to the theme of childhood in Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo

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Casanova veneziano (Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence, 1969). This exploration of the world from a child’s point of view was continued even more systematically in a six-episode television documentary, I bambini e noi (We and the Children, 1970), and then culminated in the work for which he is perhaps most affectionately remembered, Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1972). The film Comencini distilled from the original five one-hour episodes made for television has continued to be widely regarded as the best-ever adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s children’s classic. In the following years, Comencini continued to produce a wide variety of films, from bittersweet social comedies such as Lo scopone scientifico (The Scientific Cardplayer, 1972) to the classic murder thriller La donna della domenica (The Sunday Woman, 1976). In the classic style of the commedia all’italiana, L’ingorgo—una storia impossibile (Traffic Jam, 1979) uncovered the social malaise of Italian affluence using the dramatic stratagem of an all-engulfing traffic jam. Comencini’s best films from this later period, however, remained those that sought to present the child’s point of view, as in Voltati Eugenio (Eugenio, 1980), Un ragazzo di Calabria (A Boy in Calabria, 1987), and his television adaptation of the schoolboy classic Cuore (Heart, 1984). Rather appropriately his penultimate film, Buon Natale, Buon anno (Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, 1989), was the story of a contemporary retired couple who secretly elope in order to escape the busy lifestyle of their extended families and live out their last days together as anonymous lighthouse keepers. Comencini’s final film, Marcellino (Miracle of Marcellino, 1991), was a remake of Ladislao Vajda’s 1955 film in which an orphaned boy who lives with monks eventually finds true happiness in the arms of the Virgin Mary. COMERIO, LUCA (1878–1940). Cameraman, director, and producer. One of the great pioneers of the Italian film industry, Comerio had already made his mark as an enterprising young photographer when, in 1898, he began to work as cameraman for Leopoldo Fregoli. By 1907, he had set up his own film company in Milan, which was producing high-quality literary and theatrical adaptations, including Hamlet and the first version of Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) as well as comic sketches and “actualities.” In 1909, Comerio merged his company with the Società Anonima Fabbricazione Films Italiane (SAFFI), and a year later, SAFFI-Comerio was transformed into Milano Films, which Comerio helped equip with the best studio facilities in Europe at the time. Disagreement with the newly installed board of management, however, led Comerio to abandon the new company and to resurrect Comerio Film, with which he continued to produce newsreels and documentaries.

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Comerio’s documentary zeal led to many exploits and several life-threatening accidents. In 1911, he had himself tied to a plane in order to experiment with aerial action shots. In the same year, he followed the Italian troops to Tripoli, risking life and limb in order to record battle scenes, and for most of World War I, he served as official documentarist for the Italian army. At the end of the war, he attempted to return to feature film production but without much success. Reverting to documentary filmmaking, he recorded, among other things, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume in 1919. None of this, however, was enough to keep the company afloat in the general crisis that overtook the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, and Comerio Film was officially liquidated in 1922. Comerio returned to photographic work and to editing the huge mass of documentary material he had filmed in previous years. In the 1930s, impoverished and unemployed, he applied unsuccessfully for work as a cameraman at LUCE. In 1940, destitute and in poor mental health, he was admitted to a mental hospital, where he died. Having long been forgotten, Comerio and his work were brought to public attention again in 1986 when Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci reedited material from the Comerio archives to produce the remarkable compilation film Dal polo all’equatore (From the Pole to the Equator). COMMEDIA ALL’ITALIANA. Film genre. Comedy had always occupied a prominent place in Italian cinema, but from the late 1950s Italians began to see on their screens a new and more particular sort of comedy, which soon came to be known as commedia all’italiana, “comedy Italian style.” This new comedy was characterized above all by a sharper and more caustic wit and a greater and more openly acknowledged sense of cynicism. Indeed, Italian film historians have repeatedly suggested that what most typifies this new form of comedy is that it comically inflects themes, characters, and situations that could otherwise easily have been treated in a tragic vein. Ebullient and effusive, continually dramatizing hopes and aspirations, the commedia all’italiana will nevertheless almost always lack that staple of traditional comedy, the happy ending. This more incisive form of social comedy is generally taken to begin with Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (literally, “The Usual Unknowns,” although more generally known in English as Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), a film recounting a bungled burglary attempt in Rome by a motley group of petty thieves who in their absurd pretensions and lovable incompetence represent many fundamental aspects of the Italian character in the postwar period. This was followed by a host of films that comically reflected—and, with amused cynicism, reflected on—the way in which the Italian character was both confronting and incorporating the fundamental social changes being wrought by the so-called Italian economic miracle. It is significant that what are thought to be the classics of the genre, films such as Dino Risi’s Una vita

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The gang in I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), directed by Mario Monicelli. Courtesy of Photofest.

difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), and I mostri (15 from Rome, 1963); Luciano Salce’s La voglia matta (Crazy Desire, 1962); and Vittorio De Sica’s Il boom (The Boom, 1963), were all produced precisely during the period in which Italians were racing headlong toward consumerism on the back of Italy’s economic boom. Having opened the satirical floodgates, however, the genre’s corrosive wit and bemused cynicism could also be used to reinterpret Italian history in a less heroic key, as in Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), Luigi Comencini’s Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), or Luciano Salce’s Il federale (The Fascist, 1961). The more stolid mores of provincial, and especially southern, Italy were also sharply depicted and satirically derided in several other classics of the genre, particularly in Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) and Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964). Regularly produced by the same combination of directors (Risi, Monicelli, Comencini, Salce, and Ettore Scola) collaborating with screenwriters (Age e Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Ennio De Concini, Rodolfo Sonego, and Ruggero Maccari) and actors (Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, Stefania Sandrelli, and Monica Vitti), the genre flourished profusely until the early 1970s when it achieved what many believe to be its finest and most mature incarnation in Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All

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Loved Each Other So Much, 1974). Following this high point, however, with Italian society having thoroughly incorporated all the elements that the commedia all’italiana had so mischievously sought to satirize, the genre began to grow stale and decline. After offering one last brilliant rogues’ gallery in I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, 1977), directed collaboratively by Scola, Monicelli, and Risi, the genre presented something like its own epitaph in Scola’s La terrazza (The Terrace, 1980). CORBUCCI, BRUNO (1931–1996). Screenwriter and director. Younger brother of the more famous screenwriter-director, Sergio Corbucci, Bruno Corbucci entered the film industry in the early 1950s as a screenwriter on many of the films featuring Totò and the comic duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. In 1965, with already more than 30 screenwriting credits to his name, he began to direct some of his own screenplays, starting off with two James Bond parodies, James Tont operazione U.N.O. (Goldsinger, 1965) and James Tont operazione D.U.E. (The Wacky World of James Tont, 1966) and soon moving on to the Western spoof Ringo e Gringo contro tutti (Ringo and Gringo against All, 1966). He subsequently ranged freely across all the genres, from musicals such as Riderà (She’ll Laugh, 1967) and Zum zum zum—la canzone che mi passa per la testa (Zum Zum Zum—the Song that Passes through My Head, 1969), to violent Westerns all’italiana such as Shoot Gringo Shoot! (1968) and sex comedies like Quando gli uomini armarono la clava e con le donne fecero din-don (When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding Dong, 1971) and Boccaccio (Nights of Boccaccio, 1972). However, he achieved his greatest successes from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, writing and directing a dozen popular over-the-top comic polizieschi starring Tomas Milian as the gruff and dishevelled—but ultimately good-hearted—police commissioner, Nico Giraldi. From the late 1980s he abandoned the big screen to work almost exclusively for television, producing a long-running series centered on a number of young men doing their military service (Classe di Ferro, 1989–1991) and then, two years later, reuniting the cast in the five-part police comedy series Quelli della Speciale (Under Cover Cops, 1993). CORBUCCI, SERGIO (1926–1990). Director and screenwriter. A prolific director who chose to work almost exclusively within the confines of the popular genres, Corbucci, who also worked under the names Stanley Corbett and Gordon Wilson Jr., served an early apprenticeship as assistant to Aldo Vergano before beginning to direct melodramas and light musical comedies in the early 1950s. After collaborating on the screenplay of Mario Bonnard’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959), he vigorously embraced the peplum in the early 1960s, making several that are

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regarded as classics of the genre, including Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, 1961) and Maciste contro il vampiro (Goliath and the Vampires, 1961). At the same time, he also directed six of the films of the great comic actor Totò. By the mid-1960s, with Minnesota Clay (1963) and Massacro al Grande Canyon (Massacre at Grand Canyon, 1965), he had also helped bring about the Western all’italiana. He would eventually make 14 Westerns in all, the most famous of which were Django (1966), with which he helped to launch the career of Franco Nero, and Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence, 1967), which gainfully drew on the acting talents of both French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, and German actor Klaus Kinski. With the Spaghetti Western on the wane in the mid-1970s, Corbucci turned his attention to other genres. After an isolated attempt at the road movie with Il bestione (The Beast, 1974), he settled into a series of light comedies featuring popular actor-singers Adriano Celentano and Johnny Dorelli. Following two interesting variations on the giallo—La mazzetta (The Payoff, 1978), adapted from a novel by Attilio Veraldi, and Giallo napoletano (Atrocious Tales of Love and Death, 1979), an offbeat police thriller starring Marcello Mastroianni—he also directed one of the funnier Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies, Chi trova un amico trova un tesoro (Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure, 1981). Corbucci continued writing and directing comedies throughout the 1980s, reuniting Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato in Bello mio, bellezza mia (My Darling, My Dearest, 1984) and providing Alberto Sordi with one of his most bizarre roles in Sono un fenomeno paranormale (I Am an ESP, 1985). His last film, Nightclub (1989), attempted, but with only limited success, to recapture the times and the atmosphere of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). CORSICATO, PAPPI (1960–). Director, composer, scenographer, and video artist. Neapolitan-born Corsicato studied acting, dance, and choreography in New York before serving his first apprenticeship in filmmaking, working as an uncredited assistant on Pedro Almodóvar’s Àtame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1990). In 1991, he made a feature short to which, two years later, he added another two episodes to construct his first full-length film, Libera (1993). Featuring Iaia Forte, a dynamic actress whom Corsicato would continue to use in most of his subsequent films, Libera was shown to great acclaim at the Berlin Festival and, in Italy, was awarded both a Ciak d’oro and a Nastro d’argento as a most promising first work. Two years later, I buchi neri (Black Holes, 1995) mixed realism and fantasy to present an unusual love story between a prostitute and a gay truck driver. At the same time, Corsicato produced a number of videos on the work of artists Mimmo Paladino and Jannis Kounellis, as well as Argento puro (Pure Silver, 1996), a documentary on the making of Marco Ferreri’s last film, Nitrato d’argento (Silver Nitrate, 1996). In 1997, he directed “La stirpe di lana” (Lana’s De-

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scendants), an episode of the compilation film I vesuviani (The Vesuvians, 1997), made in collaboration with four other young Neapolitan directors who were loosely members of what for a short period came to be known as the New Neapolitan Cinema. After I colori della città celeste (The Colors of the Celestial City, 1998), a short film focusing on an installation by Italian artist Mario Merz in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, and a series of documentaries on artists Gilberto Zorio, Luigi Ontani, Robert Rauschenberg, Riccardo Serra, and Mimmo Paladino, Corsicato returned to fictional filmmaking with Chimera (2001), a complex and multilayered narrative of the chimerical strategies enacted by a couple in order to reignite their flagging sexual passion. Continuing to exercise his multiple talents in a variety of areas, he subsequently created a number of music and art installation videos and directed several theatrical pieces, including a dramatic adaptation of Nicolai Gogol’s The Overcoat in 2006, before returning to the big screen with Il seme della discordia (The Seed of Discord, 2008), which earned him a nomination for the Golden Lion at Venice, and in 2011 Il volto di un’altra (Another Woman’s Face, 2012). Most recently his feature documentary Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait, 2017), produced by Riccardo Scamarcio’s Buena Onda Company, has received much praise in America. Corsicato maintains his own informative website at http://www.pappicorsicato.it. COSTANZO, SAVERIO (1975–). Director and screenwriter. Son of television talk show host and sometime screenwriter Maurizio Costanzo and journalist Flaminia Morandi, Saverio studied sociology and communications at Rome’s La Sapienza University before moving to New York in 1998 where he worked as a camera operator for the American Global Vision TV and Film production company while making his first documentary, Caffè Milleluci (1999). Something of a docu-soap, recording the daily comings and goings of mostly Italian American customers in the well-known Brooklyn cafe, Milleluci consisted of some 60 10-minute episodes that, anticipating the times, Costanzo posted on the nascent internet. Returning to Italy he produced his second extended documentary, Sala rossa (Red Room, 2002), a series of six 50-minute episodes observing the daily dramas taking place in the emergency ward of a major Roman hospital. Three years later, he was able to make his first feature, Private (2005), an intense docudrama about the forceful requisitioning of a Palestinian home in the Occupied Territories by an Israeli army unit, largely seen through the eyes of the besieged Palestinian family who live there. Filmed in the Italian region of Calabria but with Palestinian and Israeli actors who had actually lived through similar events to those they were portraying, it was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival and, in Italy, earned Costanzo the David di Donatello

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for Best Emerging Director. It was also put forward as Italy’s candidate for Best Foreign Film at the 2006 Academy Awards but, in the event, was disqualified because the actors spoke in Arabic and Hebrew instead of Italian. Costanzo’s second feature, In memoria di me (In Memory of Me, 2007), an adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Furio Monicelli, portrayed a young man undertaking training for the priesthood in a Jesuit convent, struggling to come to terms with the rigidity and claustrophobia of the cloistered religious life. Although the film raised some controversy, especially in Catholic quarters, it nevertheless received a Best Film nomination at the Italian Golden Globes and won the Nastro d’argento for its editing and sound. Soon after, Costanzo turned again to documentary in his Auschwitz 2006 (2007), a recording of the reactions of a small number of survivors who accompanied a large group of Italian high school students on a memorial visit to the notorious Polish concentration camp. His third feature, La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2010), adapted the critically acclaimed eponymous novel by Paolo Giordano, in telling the story of two psychologically scarred individuals who continue to feel a natural attraction to each other from an early age but who remain painfully unable to ever actually come together. Four years later, Hungry Hearts (2014), made in English and set in New York, portrayed a similar anguish in the heartwrenching story of a loving couple with an infant child, whose relationship is tragically pushed to breaking point by the mother’s obsession with restricting the child’s diet. Like Constanzo’s previous films of wounded souls, it was a difficult film to watch, but it received seven David di Donatello nominations and six for the Nastro d’argento while also winning its two leads, Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher, the Volpi Cup at Venice. Costanzo subsequently turned to television, directing, between 2013 and 2017, three seasons (105 30-minute episodes) of In Treatment, a series produced by the pay TV network Sky and based on the Israeli series Be Tipul. The simple but effective formula of the series places the viewer in the room as psychotherapist Giovanni Mari, played by Sergio Castellito, conducts a weekly session with each one of his five patients. More recently, however, Costanzo has scored possibly his greatest triumph, directing, on invitation from the elusive Elena Ferrante herself, the first season of L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2018), an eight-part series, coproduced by RAI Fiction, HBO, and Fandango, adapting the first volume of Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet.” Completed in early 2018, the much-awaited first two episodes were acclaimed when screened as a special event at the 75th Venice Festival. A month later, both episodes also had a three-day release in selected cinemas, topping the box office for the week, before the entire eight episodes were broadcast on RAI’s first channel between November and December 2018 where they consistently scored an audience share of 30 percent. Given the

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success of the first season, Costanzo was entrusted with adapting the second book of the Quartet for a second season. Filmed in 2019, with Alice Rohrwacher brought in to film two of the eight episodes, the first two episodes of Storia del nuovo cognome (The Story of a New Name) were screened, as before, in selected cinemas for three days in January 2020 before the entire series was broadcast on RAI 1 and RAI 4K over four nights in February and March. The second season rated as high as the first and, as a result, Costanzo is reputedly at work on a third season based on the third book of the Quartet. COTTAFAVI, VITTORIO (1914–1998). Director and screenwriter. A prolific director who achieved success working mostly in the popular genres, Cottafavi began his film career as screenwriter on Goffredo Alessandrini’s Abuna Messias (Cardinal Messias, 1939) before serving as an assistant to several other more established directors, including working with Vittorio De Sica on I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944). He made his own directorial debut with I nostri sogni (Our Dreams, 1943), a modest social comedy adapted from a play by Ugo Betti with De Sica acting in the lead role. In the immediate postwar period, he made a number of socially committed melodramas that sympathetically highlighted the condition of women, among them Una donna ha ucciso (A Woman Has Killed, 1952), In amore si pecca in due (It Takes Two to Sin in Love, 1954), and Una donna libera (A Free Woman, 1954). However, Cottafavi achieved much greater popular success with escapist historical fantasy adventures such as Il boia di Lilla (Milady and the Musketeers, 1952) and Il cavalliere di Maison Rouge (The Glorious Avenger, 1954), both stylish adaptations of swashbuckling novels by Alexandre Dumas. In the late 1950s, he began to specialize in the peplum and made a half dozen sword-and-sandal epics, including two that are generally considered to be classics of the strongman genre, La vendetta di Ercole (Hercules’ Revenge, 1960, also known in the United States as Goliath and the Dragon) and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, 1961, better known in the United States as Hercules and the Captive Women). Following the lack of success of what many regard as his best film, I cento cavalieri (100 Horsemen, 1965, also known as The Son of El Cid), an adventure fantasy that self-consciously used Brechtian techniques to highlight the futility of war and the arrogance of power, he largely retired from the cinema to work in television, where he became well known for his fine adaptations of literary and theatrical works, among them six of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories (1970–1971), a version of Molière’s School for Wives (1973), and a science fiction miniseries titled A come Andromeda (A as in Andromeda, 1972). His last credited work was a muchadmired adaptation for television of Cesare Pavese’s novel, Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills, 1985).

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CRETINETTI. Character. With his name meaning, literally, “Little Cretin,” Cretinetti was the comic character created by André Deed for Itala Film in Turin between 1909 and the early 1920s. The character, known as Foolshead in English, Boireau in French, Toribio in Spanish, and Glupyskin in Russian, became so overwhelmingly popular, both in Italy and abroad, that frequently the company was able to sell the films sight unseen to willing distributors worldwide. Hilariously innocent and athletic but also manic and pernicious, Cretinetti was, in the words of one film historian, “the gymnast of destruction.” In fact, what most characterizes the Cretinetti films is a completely gratuitous sense of explosive anarchy and destructiveness. Cretinetti gleefully destroys everything around him and indeed at times comes to be destroyed himself. In Cretinetti e le donne (Cretinetti and the Women), made in 1909, Cretinetti is a sharp dresser who ignites the violent desire of every woman he passes. He is thus pursued relentlessly through the countryside by a female mob that eventually reaches him and tears him to pieces. Predictably, as the maenads leave, Cretinetti’s body parts begin to come together and reassemble. The early series of Cretinetti films were concerted exercises in a wild, surreal humor that in some ways anticipated the hectic chaos of the American Keystone Kops, but the comedy of a film like Cretinetti e gli aeroplani nemici (Cretinetti and the Enemy Airplanes, 1915), made during World War I, is darker and more ominous. Deed attempted to revive the character in the early 1920s but with little success, although by then his character’s name had entered popular Italian usage as a synonym for idiocy. CRIALESE, EMANUELE (1965–). Director and screenwriter. Regarded as one of Italy’s leading directors on the strength of less than a half dozen feature films, Crialese was born in Rome to Sicilian parents and studied film at La Sapienza University. In 1991, he moved to New York in order to enroll in New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. Before graduating in 1995, he had already made Heartless (1994), a short that won a host of prizes and was screened at the Directors Guild of America’s West Coast Showcase of student films. By 1997, he was able to independently finance his first feature film, Once We Were Strangers (1997). A romantic comedy filmed in New York and centered on the clash of different cultures in the great metropolis, it was the first film by an Italian director to be invited to screen in competition at the Sundance Festival. After four more years in New York, but working mostly in the theater, Crialese seized the opportunity to return to Italy in order to make his second feature, Respiro (2002). A dazzling, sun-drenched film, shot completely on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa and with Valeria Golino giving one of her most compelling performances as a mentally fragile but life-affirming wife and mother, who is almost something like the breath of the island, Respiro

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won both the Critics Week Grand Prize and the Young Critics Award for Best Feature at Cannes and, in Italy, was nominated for the David di Donatello for Best Film and for the Nastro d’argento for Best Screenplay. Four years later, Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006), the stunningly poetic rendition of the journey of emigration to America by a poor Sicilian family at the beginning of the 20th century, won a host of prizes when screened at the Venice Festival, including the Silver Lion and the Pasinetti Award, and was put forward as Italy’s candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Five years later, Crialese’s fourth feature, Terraferma (2011), the poignant story of a family on the island of Lampedusa struggling to reconcile their own innate sense of solidarity with poor immigrants crossing from Africa and the Italian law, which now forbids harboring them, was again awarded the Pasinetti Prize as well as the Special Jury Prize at Venice, and the film was selected as Italy’s candidate for the 2012 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Crialese’s fifth feature has yet to appear, his only recent film work being the direction of one episode of Trust, a 10-part American television series about the Getty kidnapping in Rome, screening on the FX pay-television channel. See also EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION. CRISTALDI, FRANCO (1924–1992). Producer. One of the most outstanding producers of the Italian postwar cinema, Cristaldi began in the industry in 1946 when he founded the Vides Cinematografica. He had soon produced some 50 high-quality documentaries and short films before helping to write and produce La pattuglia sperduta (The Lost Patrol, 1953), the interesting first feature by Piero Nelli. Then, during the next four decades, consistently demonstrating foresight and fine judgment, Cristaldi produced the first films of a host of young directors who would become the great names of Italian cinema, among them Francesco Rosi, Gillo Pontecorvo, Marco Bellocchio, Elio Petri, and Francesco Maselli. As well as actively promoting new talent at all levels—he was responsible for the emergence of Claudia Cardinale, whom he would later marry—he also worked with established directors such as Luchino Visconti to make Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) and Federico Fellini to produce Amarcord (1973). He gained his first great box office success in Italy with Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) but went on to achieve international renown with Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), which received the prize for Best Comedy at Cannes, two Golden Globes, and the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. In 1969, he mounted the first ItaloSoviet coproduction to make Mikhail Kalatozov’s Krasnaya palatka (The Red Tent, 1969) before also producing Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974). In the 1980s, with the Vides renamed Cristaldifilm, he again achieved great box office success with his coproduction of Jean-Jacques

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Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986) before being partly responsible for the reedited version of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), which would win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1990. His last production was another first film by an emerging director, Carlo Carlei’s La corsa dell’innocente (The Flight of the Innocent, 1993), nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. CUCINOTTA, MARIA GRAZIA (1968–). Actress. The very image of the dark-eyed, black-haired, and curvaceous Mediterranean beauty, Cucinotta began her acting career as one of the attendant showgirls of Renzo Arbore’s popular television variety show Indietro tutta (All Behind, 1987–1988). Her first film experience was a small role in Enrico Oldoini’s Vacanze di Natale ’90 (Christmas Vacation ’90, 1990). After more television work and a long line of commercials, including one directed by Ridley Scott in which she appeared with Gérard Depardieu, she came to international notice through the huge worldwide success of Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman, 1994), in which she played the female lead. She subsequently played more substantial roles in Leonardo Pieraccioni’s I laureati (Graduates, 1995) and Maurizio Ponzi’s Italiani (Italians, 1996), as well as appearing in quite a number of international productions including Alex de la Iglesia’s comic horror thriller El dìa de la bestia (The Day of the Beast, 1995), Michael Apted’s James Bond adventure The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Alfonso Arau’s black comedy Picking Up the Pieces (2000). Beginning in 2005, and while continuing to appear both in telefilms and on the big screen, Cucinotta has also taken on the role of producer for films such as the UNICEF-sponsored, multi-episode All the Invisible Children (2005), Donatella Maiorca’s Viola di mare (The Sea Purple, 2009), and Arau’s L’imbroglio nel lenzuolo (The Trick in the Sheet, 2010), on which she also collaborated as screenwriter. A year later, she also directed her first film, Il maestro (The Teacher, 2011) for which she was awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best New Short Film Director.

D DAMIANI, DAMIANO (1922–2013). Painter, cartoonist, actor, screenwriter, and director. All too frequently undervalued during his own lifetime as “merely” a genre director, Damiani was unable for financial reasons to attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and instead studied painting and graphic design at the Brera Art Academy in Milan. At the end of the war, he became part of the so-called Group of Venice, a number of groundbreaking Italian cartoonists who coalesced around the comic publication Asso di Picche (Ace of Spades), while also being one of the pioneer authors contributing stories to Bolero Film, one of the first and most widely read of the new illustrated romantic pulp magazines, the so-called photoromances. At the same time, an avid cinephile from an early age, he also began making short documentaries and, in the early 1950s, to write the screenplays for a number of low-budget genre films produced at the FERT studios in Turin. In 1960, having served little or no apprenticeship as an assistant director he nevertheless emerged with his first full-fledged feature film, Il rossetto (Lipstick, 1960), a tense and very effective police thriller, which he quickly followed with Il sicario (The Hit Man, 1960). He subsequently scripted and directed several fine literary adaptations, including L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island, 1961), from a novel by Elsa Morante, and La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1962), from a novel by Alberto Moravia, before branching out across most of the major genres, with comedies such as La rimpatriata (The Reunion, 1963) and Spaghetti Westerns such as Quién sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967). Forays into the gothic, as in La strega in amore (The Witch in Love, 1966), and a long-standing affinity with American cinema eventually led to his directing Amityville II: The Possession (1982) in the United States. Although his filmic production continued to range widely across the genres, he is best remembered for taut police and Mafia thrillers such as Il giorno della civetta (Mafia, 1968), a very persuasive adaptation of a key novel by Leonardo Sciascia; La moglie più bella (The Most Beautiful Wife, 1970), with which he launched the career of Ornella Muti; Confessioni di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (Confessions of a Police Captain, 1971), widely regarded as signaling the beginnings of the poliziesco 145

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genre; and Un uomo in ginocchio (A Man on His Knees, 1979), all demonstrating a mastery of the crime thriller genre, which culminated in his direction of the first series of the enormously popular television miniseries on the Mafia, La piovra (1984). Subsequent films, such as Quel treno per Pietrogrado (Lenin: The Train, 1988) and L’angelo con la pistola (Angel with a Gun, 1991), were also made for television. In the early 1970s, Damiani had also distinguished himself as an actor, playing a significant supporting role in Florestano Vancini’s historical drama Il delitto Matteotti (The Assassination of Matteotti, 1973). True to form, his final feature for the big screen was the crime comedy Assassini dei giorni di festa (Killers on Holiday, 2002), the adaptation of a novel by Argentinian writer Marco Denevi. DAVID DI DONATELLO. Award. Instituted in 1955 under the aegis of the Open Gate Club and the Club Internazionale del Cinema (International Cinema Club)—voluntary associations formed in the early 1950s with the aim of encouraging Italian cinema and raising its profile abroad—the David di Donatello prize has effectively become the Italian equivalent of the American Academy Awards. The name of the award derives from the gold replica of the young David sculpted by Donatello that is given each year to winners across a number of categories. The first Davids presented in 1956 at the Fiamma Cinema in Rome and under the patronage of the president of the Republic were awarded to Gianni Franciolini as Best Director for Racconti romani (Roman Stories), Vittorio De Sica as Best Actor in Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento), and Gina Lollobrigida as Best Actress in La donna più bella del mondo (Beautiful but Dangerous). The first David for Best Foreign Film went to the Walt Disney studio for its Lady and the Tramp. The award ceremony was relocated to Taormina in Sicily, in 1957 and in 1958 the strong but unofficial support that had been shown for the awards by the Associazione Generale Italiana dello Spettacolo (General Italian Association for Entertainment) and the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche e Affini (National Association of Cinematographic and Affiliated Industries, now the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali) was ratified, with both associations becoming the official promoters of the David, which from then on was legally administered by the Ente David di Donatello (the David di Donatello Authority). Beginning in 1961, the award of a Special David was introduced. In 1973, a Special David came to be instituted for the Best European Film, and between 1976 and 1995 a Premio David Luchino Visconti was also presented to distinguished directors. In any particular year, any number of Special Davids may be awarded, over and above the usual categories, as was done in 1985 when Sandro Pertini, the president of the Republic, was given a Special

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David for his patronage and support of the film industry and, in 1999, when Sophia Loren was given a Career David in recognition of lifetime achievement. From 1997, there has also been the award of a “David Giovani” (Youth David), the jury being composed of students from a number of selected schools and educational institutions throughout Italy. In 2004, the Foreign Film category was split into two distinct awards, one for films produced within the European Union and one for those outside the Union. In the same year, Steven Spielberg was awarded a Special David for his lifetime achievement, and producer Goffredo Lombardo received a Special David, which celebrated the centenary of the Titanus company. In 1981, the award ceremony was returned to Rome where it has since remained. In 2007, the Ente David di Donatello was transformed into the Accademia del Cinema Italiano—Premi David di Donatello (Academy of Italian Cinema—the David di Donatello Prize), which, as a member of the European Film Academy Network, not only administers the annual awards but also hosts a range of extended activities and sponsors collaborations with the film academies of other European countries. In 2018, the Management Committee of the Accademia announced a complete restructuring of the modalities of the award to include the following: • a new jury (reduced from 2,148 to 1,559 members) consisting of 11 members of the Academy Steering Committee together with (a) past candidates and winners and (b) leading members of all categories of the industry together with notable cultural figures • a new two-stage voting procedure with members originally providing a rating of 1–3 to form the short list and then a single vote at the final stage • eligibility stipulated as all fictional features made in the previous calendar year that have had a theatrical release of at least seven days in at least five Italian cities • the introduction of a new David dello Spettatore (Audience David) calculated on the greatest number of spectators that have seen a film as of the end of February of the awarding year • the jury of the David Giovani to be composed of 3,000 upper-year secondary school students of designated schools, with viewing and voting to be done online • a new committee of seven experts in the field to be established to preselect a short list of 15 documentaries then presented to the jury • the David for Best Foreign Film and Best European Film to be merged into one David for Best Foreign Film

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Announced in December 2018, the new rules and procedures were adopted for the David di Donatello Awards of 2019. A full listing of winners in the major categories is given in the appendix. DE ANGELIS, GUIDO (1944–) AND MAURIZIO (1947–). Musicians, arrangers, and film composers. After growing up loving country and rock music in their teens, the De Angelis brothers studied separately at the Conservatory before coming together again to form their own group, Black Stones, which performed at leading popular music and dance venues, including Rome’s famous Piper Club. At the same time, they both began working at the RCA studios in Rome as session musicians. Soon promoted together to arrangers, they worked as a team, contributing to the creation of many of the hits of top singers of the period such as Patty Pravo, Gianni Morandi, Domenico Modugno and Claudio Baglioni. By 1966, they were also releasing both extended and long-playing albums of their own pop music. The pair began composing for films in the early 1970s when, after writing a song for actor Nino Manfredi to perform at the Sanremo Festival that year, they were asked by the actor to compose the score for his up-coming directorial debut feature, Per grazia ricevuta (Between Miracles, 1971). Soon after they were also hired to create the soundtrack for the comic Spaghetti Western Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name, 1971), which topped the Italian box office that year and thus firmly established their reputation in the industry. They subsequently proceeded to score almost 200 films, becoming particularly renowned (even if often only under a number of pseudonyms, the most frequent being Oliver Onions) for their soundtracks to genre films. Although their pop-oriented and always melodic scores have at times, over the years, been underestimated by “serious” musical critics, in 1973, their score for the Bud Spencer–Terence Hill vehicle Più forte ragazzi (All the Way, Boys, 1972) was awarded the Nastro d’argento. The duo also composed prolifically for television, with their score for Sergio Sollima’s Sandokan (1976) becoming legendary; its striking opening theme in particular became an earworm afflicting Italians for many years. They continued releasing albums of new music, and by the late 1980s, having achieved something of an international reputation, they struck up a strong professional relationship with American songwriter and director Ted Mather. Together Mather and the duo produced and composed the music for several English-language film musicals, including Dance Academy (1988), City Rhythms (1989), and Faith (1990). Returning to Italy, the brothers ceased what had until then been a parallel crowded schedule of tours and live performances and, instead, enlarged the scope of their activities to also producing many of the television series and telefilms for which they were composing the music.

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Having begun in more recent years to work separately on a number of projects, in 2016, following the death of actor Bud Spencer, with whom they had worked on a host of films, the duo came together again for a memorial concert in his honor and subsequently announced, to the delight of their many fans, that they would now begin touring and performing live again. Information about their current activities and upcoming concerts can be gleaned from the webpage they maintain as the Oliver Onions: http:// www.oliveronions.it. DE BENEDETTI, ALDO (1892–1970). Playwright and screenwriter. Already an established playwright, De Benedetti began working as a screenwriter in 1923 when he scripted the first Italian-Indian coproduction, Savitri Satyavan (Savitri, 1923), directed by Giorgio Mannini. He subsequently worked on the screenplays of dozens of films, many adapted from his own stage comedies, although his contributions after 1938 were often uncredited due to the race laws that had been promulgated prohibiting Jews from working in the Italian film industry. One outstanding achievement during this period was his collaboration with Piero Tellini and Cesare Zavattini on the screenplay of Alessandro Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942). At the end of the war, he returned officially to the industry with the story and screenplay of the aptly titled La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945), directed by Mario Mattoli. After adapting Vittorio Bersezio’s play for Mario Soldati’s Le miserie del Signor Travet (His Young Wife, 1945) and collaborating with the very young Suso Cecchi D’Amico on Renato Castellani’s Mio figlio professore (Professor, My Son, 1947), he went on to work on the extremely successful series of tear-jerking melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, which included Catene (Chains, 1949), Tormento (Torment, 1950), Chi è senza peccato (Who Is without Sin, 1952), and L’ angelo bianco (The White Angel, 1955). Although De Benedetti himself gradually retired from the cinema during the 1960s, some of his stage comedies and stories continued to be adapted for the screen by both Italian and European directors. In the course of his long writing career, he also directed several films himself, among them Marco Visconti (1925) and Anita o il romanzo d’amore dell’eroe dei due mondi (Anita, 1927), a costume drama that featured the diva Rina De Liguoro as the companion and lover of Italian Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi. DE BERNARDI, PIERO (1926–2010). Screenwriter. Having moved to Rome from his native Prato in the immediate postwar period, De Bernardi began his career as a screenwriter when hired by producer Giorgio Venturini to help adapt one of Emilio Salgari’s exotic adventure novels for Gianni

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Vernucci’s Il tesoro del Bengala (The Treasure of Bengal, 1953). After several more Salgari adaptations, he met fellow aspiring screenwriter Leonardo Benvenuti while working on Valerio Zurlini’s Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano), and they initiated a long-term friendship and professional partnership that would see them penning more than 120 films together. Having established their reputation as a team working together on Alberto Lattuada’s Guendolina (1957), which earned them their first Nastro d’argento, they went on to write the screenplays for, among others, Zurlini’s La ragazza con la valigia (The Girl with a Suitcase, 1961), Vittorio De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), and Alessandro Blasetti’s Io io io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966) before also collaborating with Alberto Sordi on his Finchè c’è guerra c’è speranza (While There’s War There’s Hope, 1974). Always together, they scripted the first film featuring the hapless tragicomic character Fantozzi in Luciano Salce’s Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) and the truculent but now legendary buddy film, Mario Monicelli’s Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), which brought them two more Nastro d’argento awards. Two years later, they won their first David di Donatello with their screenplay for Dino Risi’s La stanza del vescovo (The Bishop’s Room, 1977). In the early 1980s, while continuing their collaboration with Monicelli on Il marchese del Grillo (The Marquis Del Grillo, 1981) and Amici miei—Atto II (All My Friends Part 2, 1982) they also began working regularly with emerging young comic director Carlo Verdone with whom they would write seven films, including Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful, 1980), Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Green, 1981), and Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I, 1987); Io e mia sorella, the latter earning them another shared David award. It was during this period that they made one of their rare excursions away from comedy when they collaborated with veteran director Sergio Leone on the screenplay of the epic gangster saga C’ era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984). In the 1990s, they continued their partnership, writing several more of the Fantozzi films, adapting Marcella D’Orta’s book for Lina Wertmüller’s Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore, 1992) and working with Monicelli again on Cari fottuttissimi amici (Dear Goddamned Friends, 1994) and the popular television miniseries Come quando fuori piove (Hens, Ducks, Chicken and Swine, 2000). Following Benvenuti’s death, De Bernardi wrote two more films with Verdone but also began to collaborate with Carlo Vanzina on In questo mondo di ladri (Surrounded by Thieves, 2004) and Il ritorno di Monnezza (The Return of Monnezza, 2005). His final contribution was the screenplay of Neri Parenti’s “prequel” to the Amici miei saga, Amici miei—come tutto ebbe inizio (My Friends: How It All Began, 2011).

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DE CONCINI, ENNIO (1923–2008). Screenwriter. One of the most prolific and versatile of Italian postwar screenwriters, De Concini began his career in films as assistant director and cowriter of Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946). He subsequently wrote or cowrote the screenplays of roughly 150 films, moving easily between the commercialism of the popular genres and the artistic demands of auteurist cinema. He was particularly active in the peplum, helping to write many of the classics of the genre, including Pietro Francisci’s groundbreaking Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1958) and Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1959) and Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’inferno (The Witch’s Curse, 1962). He also helped launch the horror genre by scripting Mario Bava’s seminal La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960) and the film that is regarded as marking the birth of the giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Evil Eye, 1963). At the same time, he also worked with many of the up-and-coming auteurs, collaborating with Michelangelo Antonioni on Il grido (1957), with Gillo Pontecorvo on La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957), and with Pietro Germi on Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959), for which he shared a Nastro d’argento for Best Screenplay. He scored his greatest triumph, however, with the story and screenplay of Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), for which he received both a Silver Ribbon and an Academy Award. He continued to turn out scripts in subsequent years, working with Luciano Salce on La pecora nera (The Black Sheep, 1968) and Colpo di stato (Coup d’État, 1968) and Dino Risi on Operazione San Gennaro (The Treasure of San Gennaro, 1966). He also coscripted Edward Dmytryk’s Bluebeard (1972), which starred Richard Burton and Raquel Welch. From the mid1980s, he began to work extensively for Italian television, writing, among others, three of the enormously popular Piovra (Octopus) series on the Mafia. De Concini also directed two films himself, Daniele e Maria (Daniele and Maria, 1972), a film that attempted to highlight the plight of the mentally handicapped, and Hitler, gli ultimi dieci giorni (Hitler: The Last Ten Days, 1973), which starred Alec Guinness in a close approximation of the Führer. DE FILIPPO, EDUARDO (1900–1984). Playwright, actor, and director. Illegitimate son of the much-renowned Neapolitan actor and director Eduardo Scarpetta, De Filippo first appeared on stage at the age of four. He continued to play small parts with the Scarpetta Company until he was sent away to study in college. Having completed his studies, he joined the Scarpetta Company again until 1920, when he was called up for military service. Following his discharge, he gained experience working with many of the other established theater companies in Naples before joining with his brother Peppino and his sister Titina in forming their own family company in 1931.

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Appropriately, De Filippo made his debut in cinema playing a theatrical impresario in Mario Bonnard’s Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932), which also featured the famed tenor Tito Schipa. The film was not a great success, but Eduardo and Peppino then went on to star in the extremely popular Il cappello a tre punte (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1935), a Neapolitan transposition of the novella by Pedro de Alarcón, directed by Mario Camerini. Eduardo acted, once again with Peppino, in Gennaro Righelli’s Quei due (Those Two, 1935), adapted from one of his own plays, and then the brothers were joined by Titina in Raffaello Matarazzo’s Sono stato io! (It Was I, 1938). After a first and unsuccessful attempt at directing In campagna è caduta una stella (In the Country Fell a Star, 1939), Eduardo appeared on the screen again, together with his brother, in two films directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia: Non ti pago! (I’m Not Paying, 1942) and Casanova farebbe così! (After Casanova’s Fashion, 1942). He tried his hand at directing again in 1944 with Ti conosco mascherina! (You Can’t Fool Me!, 1943) but once more met with a tepid response. In the immediate postwar period, Eduardo appeared in many films, beginning as the kind professor in Mario Mattoli’s La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945) and then playing the violent, jealous lover in Mattoli’s remake of the silent classic melodrama Assunta Spina (Scarred, 1948). There followed what many regard as his best films as director: Napoli milionaria (Side Street Story, 1950), Filumena Marturano (1951), and Questi fantasmi (These Phantoms, 1954), all successful transpositions of his own stage plays. His direction began to wane with Fortunella (1958), scripted by Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli from a story written by Federico Fellini and starring Giulietta Masina, but which, in the event, only succeeded, in the words of one critic, in being “Fellinian without Fellini.” When Spara forte, più forte . . . non ti sento (Shoot Loud, Louder . . . I Don’t Understand, 1966), which had been adapted from one of his own plays, was also savaged by the critics, De Filippo abandoned the big screen in order to return to the stage. He did, however, subsequently direct a series of very popular television adaptations of all his major plays. DE FILIPPO, PEPPINO (1903–1980). Actor and playwright. Illegitimate son of renowned Neapolitan actor Eduardo Scarpetta and younger brother of Eduardo and Titina, Peppino began acting at the age of six in the company of Vincenzo Scarpetta in Rome, playing the part of Peppiniello in Miseria e nobiltà (Poverty and Nobility). For the next two decades, he worked with many of the leading theatrical companies in both Rome and Naples. In 1931, he joined Eduardo and Titina in forming the Compagnia Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo (the De Filippo Comic Theater Company), which became one of the most successful dialect theater companies in Italy during the interwar period, performing a repertoire composed mostly of plays written by Peppino

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and Eduardo themselves. A falling-out between the brothers led to the dissolution of the family company in 1944, following which Peppino formed his own troupe with which he performed and toured widely throughout Europe and South America until the mid-1970s. Peppino made his debut in cinema together with brother Eduardo in Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932), directed by Mario Bonnard, soon followed by Mario Camerini’s il cappello a tre punte (The ThreeCornered Hat, 1935), where he played the major role of Luca, the miller. He subsequently appeared, usually in strong supporting parts, in dozens of films, including Raffaello Matarazzo’s Il Marchese di Ruvolito (The Marquis of Ruvolo, 1938) and Mario Bonnard’s Campo de’ Fiori (1943). In the postwar period, he continued to alternate between stage and screen. He played the male lead in Federico Fellini’s first film (codirected with Alberto Lattuada), Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950), and gave a brilliant performance as the repressed and moralistic bigot of “Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio” (“The Temptations of Doctor Antonio,” 1962), the episode Fellini contributed to Boccaccio’70 (1962). He is probably remembered most fondly, however, for consistently playing the foil to the great comic actor Totò, appearing in no fewer than 14 films with him, including Totò, Peppino e . . . l a malafemmina (Totò, Peppino, and the Hussy, 1956), Totò, Peppino e la dolce vita (Totò, Peppino and “La Dolce Vita,” 1961), and Totò Peppino e . . . i fuorilegge (Totò, Peppino and the Outlaws, 1956), for which he received a Nastro d’argento as best supporting actor. In the 1960s, he was also frequently seen on television, appearing as “Peppino cuoco sopraffino” (Peppino the most refined cook) in a very popular advertisement shown on Carosello between 1959 and 1963, and as Gaetano Pappagone, a comic character in the variety show Scala Reale (Royal Straight), broadcast in 1966. His final appearance on the big screen was as Marcello Mastroianni’s gambling-addicted father in Sergio Corbucci’s comic murder mystery Giallo napoletano (Atrocious Tales of Love and Death, 1979). DE FILIPPO, TITINA (1898–1965). Actress and playwright. Illegitimate daughter of renowned Neapolitan actor Eduardo Scarpetta, and elder sister of Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo, Titina (birthname Annunziata) began acting onstage at the age of seven. She was soon a member of the Teatro Nuovo di Napoli, performing regularly in its musical revues and variety shows. In 1931, she united with her two brothers to form the Compagnia Teatro Umoristico i De Filippo (the De Filippo Comic Theater Company) and, in partnership with Peppino, wrote many of the plays in the company’s repertoire, the best known being Quaranta ma non li dimostra (Forty Years Old but It Doesn’t Show) and Ma c’è papà (But Daddy’s Here). Together with the two brothers she also appeared in films in the late 1930s, but her

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first significant film role was as Totò’s fiery wife, Concetta, in Amleto Palermi’s San Giovanni Decollato (St. John the Baptist Beheaded, 1940). After World War II, while continuing to work to great acclaim on the stage, she appeared in some 30 films, usually in strong supporting roles. However, she also gave a memorable performance playing the lead in Filumena Marturano (1951), a film adaptation of the stage play that her brother Eduardo had written for her several years earlier. In addition to playing her character roles, she also worked as a screenwriter and shared a Nastro d’argento in 1952 for her collaboration on the screenplay of Renato Castellani’s Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents’ Worth of Hope, 1952). DE LAURENTIIS, DINO (1919–2010). The son of a pasta manufacturer, Dino (birthname Agostino) De Laurentiis studied acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before playing a number of small parts in Mario Camerini’s Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1939) and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939). In 1940, having founded Realcine, he produced his first film, L’ultimo combattimento (The Last Fight), directed by Pietro Ballerini. After the war, he moved to Lux Film and scored his first major success as executive producer of Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), whose female star, Silvana Mangano, he would, in the same year, marry. In 1950, he teamed up with Carlo Ponti to create the Ponti–De Laurentiis company, whose studios produced the first Italian color film, Totò a colori (Totò in Color, 1952). De Laurentiis subsequently oversaw the production of some of the most notable films of the immediate postwar period including Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954) and Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954) and Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957), both of which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The partnership with Ponti dissolved in the mid-1950s, prompting De Laurentiis to set up his own studios on the outskirts of Rome, which he named, with only a touch of hubris, Dinocittà. The studio achieved some success with international blockbusters such as John Huston’s The Bible (1966) and Edward Dmytryk’s Anzio (1968); however, it eventually became economically unviable, and De Laurentiis was forced to sell. Consequently, in 1973, he moved to the United States, where he produced a series of critically acclaimed films that included Three Days of the Condor (directed by Sidney Lumet, 1975), Ragtime (directed by Milos Forman, 1981), and Blue Velvet (directed by David Lynch, 1986). He was also responsible, however, for a number of expensive flops, such as Hurricane (directed by Jan Troell, 1979) and Dune (directed by David Lynch, 1984). In 1984, he attempted once again to set up a new megastudio, this time under the name of De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG); however, the venture was short lived, and the studio soon folded.

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After the death of Mangano, with whom he had four children, De Laurentiis married Martha Schumaker in 1990, and together they continued to produce films, the most notable of which was Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001). Having already garnered a host of international prizes and much recognition during his 60-year career, in 2001 De Laurentiis was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement. In Italy, he was further honored in 2003 when he was presented with a Career Golden Lion at the Venice Festival and, in 2006, a 50th Anniversary David di Donatello for his overall contribution to Italian cinema. DE MARTINO, ALBERTO (1929–2015). Actor, jazz pianist, dubber, screenwriter, and director. Son of makeup artist Romolo De Martino, Alberto De Martino had frequented film sets from an early age, making his first uncredited appearance on the big screen as one of the sons of Scipio in Carmine Gallone’s Roman epic Scipione l’africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal, 1937). Having decided that acting was not his forte but still aspiring to work in the film industry, in the immediate postwar period he teamed up with fellow aspirant Sergio Sollima to make several documentaries before beginning an apprenticeship as assistant director on a number of films directed by Giuseppe Masini, Mario Costa, and Giorgio Simonelli. He graduated to directing in the early 1960s with the sword-and-sandal epic Il gladiatore invincibile (The Invincible Gladiator, 1961). This initiated what would be a gleeful foray across all the major genres, continuing to dally with the peplum in Perseo l’invincibile (Perseus against the Monsters, 1963), Il trionfo di Ercole (Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors, 1964), and La rivolta dei sette (The Revolt of the Seven, 1964) before moving on to the Spaghetti Western with his Gli eroi di Fort Worth (Assault on Fort Texan, 1965), 100,000 dollari per Ringo (A Hundred Thousand Dollars for Ringo, 1965), and Django spara per primo (Django Shoots First, 1966). At the same time, he also dabbled with the spy genre in Upperseven, l’uomo da uccidere (The Spy with Ten Faces, 1966) and OK Connery (Operation Kid Brother, 1967). OK Connery is a brazen but inventive imitation of the James Bond films for which Neil Connery, the real-life brother of Sean Connery (the reigning James Bond at the time), was recruited to play in the film the character of Dr. Connery, the brother of the legendary British master spy who is unavailable for the task. Dr. Connery, a cosmetic surgeon who uses hypnosis in his practice, comes to be co-opted by the authorities to help thwart the evil syndicate Thanatos’s familiar plot to take over the world. After several crime dramas, among which Roma come Chicago (Bandits in Rome, 1968), in which John Cassavetes was enlisted to play an Italian gangster, and Il consigliori (Counsellor at Crime, 1973), De Martino again adopted the strategy of jumping on the coattails of a previously successful international film with his L’Anticristo (The AntiChrist, 1974) a fairly trans-

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parent simulation of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Holocaust 2000 (1977), a reworking of Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). After directing several more reasonably effective thrillers and, under the pseudonym of Martin Herbert, making the action sci-fi film Miami Golem (1985), De Martino retired from active filmmaking. DE SANTIS, GIUSEPPE (1917–1997). Critic, screenwriter, and director. Widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of Neorealism, De Santis enrolled in directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1941 and was soon one of the leading critical voices in the journal Cinema, which advocated a greater sense of realism in Italian films. This advocacy was put into practice in 1942 when he collaborated on the script and served as assistant director on the film that is generally regarded as the immediate forebear of Neorealism, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). In the immediate postwar period, De Santis collaborated with Mario Serandrei, Luchino Visconti, Gianni Puccini, and others on the partisan documentary Giorni di Gloria (Days of Glory, 1945). He then made his directorial debut with Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), a film about the last days of the Resistance movement financed by the National Partisan Association. A year later, he achieved what would remain the greatest success of his career with Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), a film that daringly mixed a Neorealist preoccupation with foregrounding contemporary social conditions with the more popular elements of the American crime film and tragic melodrama. The film broke all box office records, launched the career of Silvana Mangano, and introduced a new upfront eroticism into Italian cinema. Despite his strongly theoretical background as a critic, De Santis proved to be an extremely eclectic director, making a wide range of films that included pastoral melodramas such as Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950), urban Neorealist chronicles such as Roma ore 11 (Rome 11:00, 1952), the romantic rural fable of Giorni d’amore (Days of Love, 1954), and the epic Italiani brava gente (Attack and Retreat, 1964), a masterful re-creation of the disastrous rout of the Italian army in Russia at the end of World War II. After this extraordinary film, and despite a host of projects, De Santis was strangely but consistently marginalized within the film industry. His only subsequent film, Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire (A Qualified Professional with an Assured Future, 1972), was very poorly received and generally panned. Nevertheless, after a long period of silence and neglect, his significant contribution to Italian cinema was finally recognized in 1995 when he was presented with a Golden Lion for his lifetime achievement at the Venice Festival.

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DE SANTIS, PASQUALINO (1927–1996). Cinematographer. Brother of director Giuseppe De Santis, Pasquale (or Pasqualino, as he was most often known) studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before working as assistant cameraman for Piero Portalupi on a number of Giuseppe De Santis’s films during the early 1950s. He then worked as camera operator for Gianni Di Venanzo until Di Venanzo’s death in 1966. His first solo film as director of photography was Francesco Rosi’s C’era una volta (More Than a Miracle, 1967), but only two years later he received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet, 1968). In the years that followed, he worked again with Rosi on all Rosi’s major films, including Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972), Lucky Luciano (1974), and Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), and photographed Federico Fellini’s Block-notes d’un regista (Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, 1969). However, he appeared to provide the best proof of his brilliance as a cinematographer in the films he did with Luchino Visconti: La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974), and L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976). Internationally he also worked on a number of films with Robert Bresson, including Lancelot du Lac (1974) and Le diable, probablement (The Devil, Probably, 1977), and with Joseph Losey on The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). In 1995, together with his brother, Giuseppe, and fellow cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci, De Santis founded the Nuova Università del Cinema e della Televisione with a special scholarship established for cinematography. After a successful and prolific career, crowned with many prizes and awards, including the Nastro d’argento four times and two David di Donatello, De Santis died in Ukraine in 1996 on the set of Francesco Rosi’s La tregua (The Truce, 1996). DE SETA, VITTORIO (1923–2011). Director and screenwriter. Following an apprenticeship as assistant to French filmmaker Jean-Paul Le Chanois, in 1954 De Seta began making a series of prize-winning documentary films on the lives of fishermen and shepherds of both his native Sicily and Sardinia, which included Lu tempu de li pisci spata (Swordfish Season, 1954), Sulfarara (Sulphur Mine, 1955), Pasqua in Sicilia (Easter in Sicily, 1955), Contadini del mare (Farmers of the Sea, 1955), and Pastori di Orgosolo (Shepherds of Orgosolo, 1958). Socially committed but also highly lyrical documentaries, they demonstrate the strong influence of Robert Flaherty. This influence was carried over into his first fictional feature, I banditi di Orgosolo (Bandits at Orgosolo, 1961), made in collaboration with his wife but produced, photographed, and edited by De Seta himself. The film presents, with compassion but without sentimentality, the tragic plight of a poor shepherd forced by

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circumstances to become a bandit and, eventually, to lose all his sheep, one by one. The film’s austere lyricism earned De Seta the prize for a first work at the Venice Festival in 1961 and a Nastro d’argento for photography. In 1965, he made his second fictional feature, Un uomo a metà (Almost a Man), the moving portrayal of a young writer’s descent into madness. After a third feature, L’invitata (The Uninvited, 1969), he produced Diario di un maestro (A Teacher’s Diary, 1973), a four-episode miniseries for television that ignited great discussion and controversy regarding the Italian school system. There followed two other documentaries for Italian television, Hong Kong, città di profughi (Hong Kong, City of Refugees, 1980) and In Calabria, a three-part documentary for Raidue made in 1993. After a long absence, De Seta returned to Sicily in 2003 to make a short documentary on the life and work of anthropologist Antonino Uccello. Three years later, he made his last feature, Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara, 2006), a film about the trials and tribulations of a Senegalese immigrant attempting, but ultimately failing, to build a better life in Italy and so returning to the home he had originally fled in Senegal. DE SICA, CHRISTIAN (1951–). Screen and stage actor, screenwriter, director, singer, and television presenter. Son of actor and director Vittorio De Sica and actress Maria Mercader, De Sica enrolled in a degree in literature and fine arts at Rome’s La Sapienza University in order to please his father but secretly began to perform as a crooner in nightclubs and other dancing venues along the Tiber. Attempting to seriously embark on a musical career, he competed at the 1973 Sanremo Festival with the song “Mondo mio” but failed to impress the judges. By this time, he had already played small parts in films, beginning with a minor role in Roberto Rossellini’s made-fortelevision film Blaise Pascal (1972) and appearing as an uncredited extra in his father’s Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973). Following several more supporting roles in a number of other films, he was chosen to play the title role in Paolo Nuzzi’s Giovannino (1976), for which he was awarded a Special David di Donatello for his acting. By his own account, however, his real break in films came with his appearances in Carlo Vanzina’s Sapore di mare (Time for Loving, 1983) and, immediately following, Vacanze di Natale (Christmas Vacation, 1983), generally considered to be the film that laid down the formula for what would later be called the cinepanettone, the genre that De Sica would dominate for the next three decades. His next milestone came with Vanzina’s Yuppies—i giovani di successo (Yuppies, 1986), a film that perfectly reflected the superficial affluence that Italy was experiencing following the violent “leaden” years of the 1970s and in which he first teamed up with Massimo Boldi, the actor with whom he would, for almost two decades, share the cinepanettone crown. Beginning with Enrico Oldoini’s Vacanze di Natale ’90 (Christmas Vacation ’90, 1990), Boldi and De

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Sica appeared together in Vacanze di Natale ’91 (Christmas Vacation ’91, 1991), in Vanzina’s historical spoof S.P.Q.R. 2000 e ½ anni fa (S.P.Q.R. 2,000 and a Half Years Ago, 1994), and in Vacanze di Natale ’95 (Christmas Vacation ’95, 1995). By this time, De Sica had also become confident enough to move behind the camera to direct himself in a handful of films that included a modern remake of one of his father’s most famous films, Il conte Max (Count Max, 1991), and an attempt at a historical costume drama in Tre (Three, 1996). The next decade marked the true flowering of the cinepanettone, with De Sica and Boldi appearing with clockwork regularity at Christmas time in Merry Christmas (2001), Natale sul Nilo (Christmas on the Nile, 2002), Natale in India (Christmas in India, 2003), Christmas in Love (2004), and Natale a Miami (Christmas in Miami, 2005). Even though the films were still achieving great box office, at this point De Sica and Boldi decided to go their separate ways. Still under contract to producer Aurelio De Laurentiis, De Sica continued, under the direction of Neri Parenti, to ritually turn out the annual cinepanettone in Natale a New York (2006), Natale in crociera (Christmas Cruise, 2007), Natale a Rio (2008), Natale a Beverley Hills (2009), Natale in Sudafrica (Christmas in South Africa, 2010), and Vacanze di Natale a Cortina (Christmas Holidays at Cortina, 2011). Perhaps unsurprisingly in 2009 De Sica was awarded a Special David “for 25 years of successful Christmas comedies.” His almost complete identification with the lightweight genre was, nevertheless, slightly misleading since he had during this period also published an autobiography, ironically titled Figlio di papà (Daddy’s Boy, 2008), appeared in the stage musical Parlami di me (Talk to Me about Me, 2006–2008), and released two CDs of love songs and a tribute to one of his favorite singers, Frank Sinatra. Significantly, he had also demonstrated the range of his acting talents by taking the lead role in Pupi Avati’s Il figlio più piccolo (The Youngest Son, 2010), providing a dramatic and highly moving performance that earned him both an Italian Golden Globe and a Nastro d’argento for Best Actor. In the same year, he also played a supporting role in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s gripping thriller The Tourist (2010). He subsequently reverted to his comic characterizations in films like Colpi di fulmine (Lightning Strike, 2012) and Vacanze ai Caraibi (Holidays in the Caribbean, 2015) but at the same time also hosted Italian TV variety shows and appeared in the American television series Mozart in the Jungle (2016). Continuing to pursue his musical career, in 2017 he also released a CD of Christmas songs, titled Merry Christian. Prompted by long-running popular demand, in 2018 De Sica and Boldi reunited and, under De Sica’s direction, made Amici come prima (Friends as Before), a cinepanettone in all but name

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and, significantly, released a week before Christmas. Details about the film and the duo’s reunion are plentifully available on De Sica’s website: https:// www.christiandesicaonline.com. DE SICA, VITTORIO (1902–1974). Stage and screen actor, director, and screenwriter. One of Italy’s most prolific but also best-loved actor-directors, De Sica was born in Sora, a small town south of Rome, but spent his earliest years in Naples, hence his lifelong affinity with the city. In 1914, the De Sica family moved to Rome, where the young Vittorio studied to become an accountant. In 1923, while working at the Bank of Italy and largely at the urging of a close friend, he applied to fill a vacancy with the theater company of Tatiana Pavlova and, to his own surprise, was accepted. Having served his stage apprenticeship covering a wide range of character parts, including clowns and old men, in 1925 he transferred to the company of Luigi Almirante, where he specialized in playing the romantic lead in sentimental comedies before moving, in 1927, to play similar roles in the company of Almirante-Rissone-Tofano. From 1931 to 1933, he appeared in many of the musical revues staged by the Za Bum company under the direction of Mario Mattoli. In 1933, together with Umberto Melnati and actress Giuditta Rissone, whom he would eventually marry, he formed his own theater company, which performed comic revues and melodramas but also hosted up-andcoming young guest directors such as Luchino Visconti. By this time, De Sica had also begun to act in films. After an isolated early appearance in Edoardo Bencivenga’s L’Affaire Clemenceau (The Clemenceau Affair, 1918) and some undistinguished supporting parts in several minor films in the late 1920s, he achieved almost instant star status playing the male lead in Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932), a role that established the nice-boy-next-door image that would characterize him in the following years. The song “Parlami d’amore Mariù” (“Sing to Me of Love, Maria”), which he casually sang in the film, was released separately and became a big hit on the radio, generating an even wider popularity. He subsequently appeared in a host of films, the most memorable being the handful of light comedies and social melodramas directed by Camerini, where he was frequently paired with the most prominent female star of the time, Assia Noris, as in Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935), Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1937), and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939). In the early 1940s, while continuing to divide his time between stage and screen, De Sica started to also direct films, beginning with several sentimental comedies in the white telephone vein, among which Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940), Maddalena zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, 1940), Teresa Venerdì (Doctor, Beware, 1941), and the historical romantic melodrama Un garibaldino al convento (A Garibaldian in the Convent,

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1942). His next film, I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, made in 1942 but only released in 1944), initiated an entirely new phase in his artistic development. A profoundly moving but wholly unsentimental study of a marriage breakup seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old child, I bambini was filmed in a more realistic style and, moreover, marked the beginning of De Sica’s long and fruitful collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. Their next film together, La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven, 1943 but only released in 1945), the story of a pilgrimage to the Catholic shrine of Loreto, was made entirely in Rome and under considerable difficulty during the period of German occupation. Financed by the Vatican and produced by the Centro Cattolico di Cinematografia, the film continued in the more realistic style of the previous film but it also served the purpose of helping De Sica (and others) to avoid being forced to join the new studios that were being set up in Venice under the aegis of the Republic of Salò. In the immediate postwar period, developing further the socially committed and realistic approach that by now had become his characteristic style, De Sica, always flanked by Zavattini, directed two films that would come to be regarded as landmarks of Neorealism: Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), the latter universally hailed as a masterpiece of world cinema and winning, among a host of other prizes and awards, six Nastri d’argento and the Special Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. This, however, did not prevent De Sica’s next film, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), from being severely criticized by many left-wing Italian critics for its mix of fable and social realism, while Umberto D. (1952), now generally recognized as one of the most perfect expressions of Neorealist cinema, was pilloried by the Italian government itself for what it judged as an unflattering portrayal of social conditions in postwar Italy. Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953), which De Sica directed and coproduced with David O. Selznick, was both a critical and box office flop, in part due to Selznick’s intrusive reediting of the English version, but the affectionate portrait of Naples in L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954) revived De Sica’s reputation and popularity as a director. By this stage, however, he had also revived his star status as an actor with his portrayal of the comic philandering officer of the carabinieri in Luigi Comencini’s enormously popular Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953) and its equally successful sequels Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky) and Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955). He continued to appear in a host of both major and minor roles, often as a duplicitous but lovable old rogue, but his greatest performance during this period was undoubtedly as the title character of Roberto Rossellini’s Oscar-nominated Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959). The 1960s saw several more directorial triumphs, beginning with La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), the adaptation of a

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wartime novel by Alberto Moravia that earned De Sica a nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes and Sophia Loren an Academy Award for her stirring performance. De Sica would direct Loren again, together with Marcello Mastroianni, in his two other triumphs of the 1960s, Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), which was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1965, and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), which received two Oscar nominations and the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film. After a handful of films that were generally judged inferior to what he had been able to achieve at his peak, De Sica regained some of his former brilliance with Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1970), an elegant and very moving adaptation of the elegiac novel by Giorgio Bassani that won, among a host of other prizes, the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the Berlin Golden Bear Award. His last film, widely regarded as below par for a director who had made some of the greatest masterpieces of world cinema, paired Sophia Loren with Richard Burton in the romantic melodrama Il viaggio (The Voyage, 1974).

Vittorio De Sica directing Umberto D. (1952). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

DEED, ANDRÉ (1879–1938). Actor, writer, and director. Following an early career as a stage performer and sometime actor in the films of Georges Méliès, Deed (whose real name was André Chapuis or De Chapais) had

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become one of the Pathé studios’ greatest stars with his creation of the popular comic character Boireau. Still at the peak of his fame, Deed was lured to Turin by a lucrative contract from Giovanni Pastrone, head of Itala Film. At Itala, Deed created the even more popular character of Cretinetti, the overwhelming success of which did much to solidify Itala’s financial position (and thus help it, only a few years later, to finance Cabiria). Deed assembled an energetic team around him that included actors Alberto Collo, Emilio Ghione, and Valentina Frascaroli (whom he later married) and was able to produce a film a week for more than two years, films that were so popular they were bought sight unseen by distributors throughout Europe and America. In 1912, Deed broke his contract with Itala and returned to Paris to work for Pathé again but, in 1914, was induced by legal threat to return to Turin, where he continued to make feature-length Cretinetti films, which included La paura degli aeromobili nemici (The Fear of the Enemy Airplanes, 1915) and the extremely popular Cretinetti e gli stivali del brasiliano (Foolshead and the Brazilian Boots, 1916). Following another brief period in France, he returned in 1919 to Italy, where, after several other Cretinetti films, he made L’uomo meccanico (The Mechanical Man, 1922), a much more ominous and curious mixture of comedy, crime, and science fiction that, with its two dueling robots, appears to anticipate certain elements of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Deed returned to Paris in 1923 and thereafter played small parts in a number of otherwise unremarkable films. With the coming of sound, he retired completely from the film industry, preferring to work as a night watchman at the Pathé studios. DEL MONTE, PETER (1943–). Screenwriter and director. Born in San Francisco to Italian Jewish parents who had fled to the United States during the World War II, Del Monte returned to Italy with the family at the age of 10. After a degree in letters from Rome University, majoring in cinema studies, he attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia during Roberto Rossellini’s period as interim director of the school. Taking advantage of Rossellini’s refusal to enforce the convention that students at the Centro should only make short films, Del Monte’s graduation film, Fuori campo (1969), was a full-length feature. Even though he had already proven himself able to direct feature-length films, Del Monte tried his hand at being a pianist in a jazz band and teaching literature before writing and directing his first feature, Irene, Irene (1975), an intense existential drama betraying the patent influence of Ingmar Bergman. Judged an auspicious beginning, it earned Del Monte a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Emerging Director. Five years passed before he was able to fund his second feature, L’altra donna (1980), the portrait of an intimate relationship that develops between a well-to-do Italian woman and the Ethiopian housemaid she employs. The film was innovative, not least for

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daring to broach the difficult theme of immigration, and received a special Jury Citation at the Venice Festival. Much lighter in tone and made on commission, Piso Pisello (Sweet Pea, 1981) was something of a belated and lighthearted satire on the short-lived hippie culture in Italy, carried out through the story of a 13-year-old boy happily taking on the responsibilities of a caring father for a son engendered in a one-night stand with a foreign visitor to the family home. A compelling mixture of the real and the fantastic, a trait that would become characteristic of Del Monte’s cinema, the film competed for the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Festival. Made in France and on commission, Invitation au voyage (Invitation to Travel, 1982), an adaptation of Moi, ma soeur (1976), a recently published novel by French writer Jean Bany, which recounted the story of a morbidly close relationship between a brother and sister, was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. Having returned to Italy Del Monte directed Piccoli fuochi (Little Flames, 1985), the story of a six-year-old boy who, emotionally neglected by his self-absorbed middle-class parents, actively interacts with three imaginary characters in his bedroom wardrobe. The boy’s incipient sexual attraction to the young maid hired to look after him by his otherwise negligent parents results in a plot hatched with his imaginary companions to eliminate the girl’s intrusive boyfriend. Another surreal mixture of the real and the fantastic, the film was awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story. Two years later, Giulia e Giulia (1987) starred Kathleen Turner in a dark thriller centered on a recently widowed American woman living in Trieste afflicted by what may be a psychologically dissociated personality due to her intense grief but also, possibly, the cosmic point of intersection of parallel universes. A film that, typical of Del Monte, both thematizes and enacts a crossing of borders, Giulia and Giulia has gone down in history as the first film to be completely shot on high-definition videotape and then transferred to 35 mm film for theatrical release. After Etoile (Ballet, 1989), another story of mental dissociation and multiple personalities, this time in the world of ballet, Tracce di vita amorosa (Traces of an Amorous Life, 1990) presented 14 short stories about love, broadly defined, organized chronologically from infancy to old age. Screened in competition at Venice, the film’s episodic structure disconcerted the critics, who thus gave it a relatively hostile reception. Five years later, he approached the same theme slightly differently in Compagna di viaggio (Traveling Companion, 1996), a very distinctive road movie in which a wayward teenager’s paid accompaniment of an old professor with dementia turns into a delicately wrought journey of self-discovery. Asia Argento’s performance as the teenager in the film earned her a second David di Donatello for Best Actress, and the film brought Del Monte Silver Ribbon nominations for both Best Director and Best Screenplay. La ballata dei lavavetri (The Ballad of the Windscreen Washers, 1998), the story of an

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extended Polish family in Rome struggling to stay alive and united while awaiting the opportunity of migrating to Canada, dealt with the thorny theme of immigration in Del Monte’s usual blend of reality and fantasy. In the new millennium, his Controvento (Against the Wind, 2000) received only a lukewarm reception despite Margherita Buy and Valeria Golino costarring as the female leads, but, seven years later, Nelle tue mani (2007), the story of a couple’s fracturing due to a resurgence of the wife’s past, was much better received and brought Del Monte his fourth nomination for the Nastro d’argento. His most recent film, Nessuno mi pettina bene come il vento (No One Combs Me Better Than the Wind, 2014), its title borrowed from a line by poet Alda Merini, charts the transformation in the ordered life of a retiring writer occasioned by the disruptive presence of an assertive 11year-old girl unexpectedly left in her care. The introverted director has admitted that it’s something of a projection of his own fears and preoccupations. DEL POGGIO, CARLA (1925–2010). Actress. Del Poggio, born Maria Luisa Attanasio, in her teens studied acting for a year at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, during which time she came to the notice of Vittorio De Sica, who immediately cast her as the spirited young schoolgirl in Maddalena zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, 1940) and then in a similar role in Un garibaldino al convento (A Garibaldian in the Convent, 1942). In 1945, she met, and soon after married, director Alberto Lattuada, who cast her in the role of the prostitute-sister of the protagonist of his gangster melodrama Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946). Del Poggio continued to take on dramatic roles in several of Lattuada’s subsequent films, including Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948); however, she reverted to a lighter vein in Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1951), which Lattuada coproduced and codirected with Federico Fellini and in which Del Poggio plays a pretty, aspiring stage actress who lures an infatuated Peppino De Filippo away from the plainer Giulietta Masina. After strong performances in Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and Roma ore 11 (Rome 11:00, 1952), she also tried her hand at acting in stage revues, with a measure of success. However, her film career seemed to falter after this. She appeared in several minor French films and in Cose da pazzi (Craziness, 1954), a rather lackluster comedy directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, before making what would be her last film for the silver screen, Hugo Fregonese’s I girovaghi (The Wanderers, 1956), where she shared top billing with English actor Peter Ustinov. In the following years, she limited her appearances to several films made for television and

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two miniseries, a remake of the classic Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1957), and an Italian version of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1965–1966). DELLI COLLI, TONINO (1923–2005). Cinematographer. Delli Colli began his long career at Cinecittà in 1938, initially working as cameraman and assistant to Ubaldo Arata and Anchise Brizzi. His first film as director of photography was Finalmente sì (Finally Yes, 1944), a Titanus production in the vein of the so-called white telephone films, directed by Laszlo Kish. In the postwar period, he photographed a number of otherwise unremarkable films before shooting the first Italian color film, Totò a colori (Totò in Color, 1952), directed by Steno and Mario Monicelli. After a host of undistinguished Italian–American productions, Delli Colli was recruited by Pier Paolo Pasolini for his first film, Accattone (Accattone!, 1961). He subsequently served as director of photography for all of Pasolini’s major films (12 in all) while at the same time also working with Sergio Leone on Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968), and C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984); with Federico Fellini on Intervista (Interview, 1986), Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985), and Le voci della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989); with Lina Wertmüller on Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975); with Mario Monicelli on I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, 1977); and with Marco Ferreri on Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1981). In 1997, he photographed Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning international success La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful). He also collaborated with many distinguished foreign directors, photographing Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Death and the Maiden (1994), and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986). In a career that spanned more than 60 years, Delli Colli won four David di Donatello and six Nastro d’argento awards. In 2005, in recognition of his international standing, the American Society of Cinematographers also presented him with their International Life Achievement Award. DEODATO, RUGGERO (1939–). Screenwriter and director. After serving as assistant director for Roberto Rossellini on Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) and Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night, 1960), Deodato worked across most of the popular genres, frequently collaborating as assistant or codirecting with Antonio Margheriti on films as different as the peplum Ursus il terrore dei Kirghizi (Hercules, Prisoner of Evil, 1964) and the low-budget science fiction fantasy I criminali della galassia (Wild, Wild Planet, 1965). On his own, he directed (at times under the

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pseudonym Roger Rockfeller) exotic adventures, jungle films, musical comedies, Westerns, and police thrillers. He made his greatest mark, however, in the splatter-horror genre, achieving international cult status as “Mr. Cannibal” for his controversial and highly censored Ultimo mondo cannibale (The Last Cannibal World, 1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, 1980), described as “the most savage and brutal film in modern history.” From the late 1980s, he worked on much milder television fare, such as the RAI teen series I ragazzi del muretto (1993) and the comedy crime series Noi Siamo Angeli (We Are Angels, 1997), but in 2005, a Cannibal Holocaust 2 was announced as being in preproduction. The film failed to materialize, and in recent years, Deodato has often denied having had a particular interest in the horror genre, although this hasn’t prevented him from contributing a segment to the horror anthology The Profane Exhibit (2013) and, even more recently, directing the gorefest Ballad of Blood (2016). DI GIANNI, LUIGI (1926–2019). Documentary filmmaker. Widely regarded as one of Italy’s leading documentarists, Di Gianni graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1954 with the short film L’arresto (The Arrest), a free adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozess), which was screened out of competition at the Venice Festival that year. He subsequently embarked on a series of evocative ethnographic documentaries focusing on life and customs in some of the poorer regions of southern Italy, beginning with Magia Lucana (Lucania Magic, 1958), followed by Nascita e morte nel meridione - San Cataldo (Birth and Death in the South: San Cataldo, 1959), Frana in Lucania (Landslide in Lucania, 1959), Donne di Bagnara (Women of Bagnara, 1959) and La Punidura (The Punidura, 1959). In the 1960s, while continuing to document magical and ritual practices in provincial Italy, he also extended his sights to more historical and contemporary subjects, as in Via Tasso (Tasso Street, 1961), a documentary on the Nazi occupation of Rome, and La tragedia del Vajont (The Tragedy of the Vajont, 1964), an investigation into the 1963 dam disaster in northern Italy that caused close to 2,000 deaths. At the same time, he directed a number of theatrical adaptations for television, among them versions of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Act without Words, while his disturbing and oneiric La tana (The Lair, 1967) was nominated for the Palme d’or for Best Short Film at Cannes. His even more provocative full-length fictional feature Il tempo dell’inizio (The Time of the Beginning, 1974), a portrayal (in black and white) of the visions and dreams of an inmate of an insane asylum, earned him the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. In 1988, while teaching at the Centro Sperimentale, he was awarded a second Nastro d’argento for his short documentary L’arte del vetro (The Art of Glass,

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1987), and two years later he celebrated the memory of one of his old masters, Cesare Zavattini, in a one-hour documentary made for the Istituto LUCE. He subsequently documented the survival of maternal cults in La madonna in cielo, la “matre” in terra (The Madonna in Heaven, the Mother on Earth, 2006) while he himself became the subject of La malattia de l’arcobaleno (The Rainbow Sickness, 2006), a documentary on his work directed by Simone Del Grosso. In the same year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen, Germany, which also created a foundation for the preservation and diffusion of his work. In the following years, while continuing to teach filmmaking in a number of venues, he also wrote and directed a much lauded television docudrama on the legendary prince and musician Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (2009) followed in 2013 by Un medico in campagna (A Country Doctor), an adaptation for television of Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name. In 2014, having been nominated president of the Lucania Film Commission, he revisited the site of his very first documentary to make Lucania Persa (Lost Lucania), a film that, with some chagrin, attempted to take stock of the modernization that had taken place in an archaic Italian south that he had spent a lifetime documenting. DI LEO, FERNANDO (1932–2003). Playwright, novelist, poet, screenwriter, and director. Critically undervalued during his own lifetime as a mere genre director, di Leo actually came to filmmaking with a very cultured background. Born into a well-to-do family, he grew up with a passion for literature and the theater and, in his teens, had already published a prizewinning play. He subsequently edited a literary magazine, collections of poetry, short stories, and a novel before moving from his native Puglia to Rome, where he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and study law at the university. His studies were interrupted by a call-up to military service, but on his return, he abandoned the law in favor of pursuing a newfound interest in cinema by enrolling in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After helping to direct an episode of the ensemble film Gli eroi di ieri, oggi, domani (The Heroes of Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 1964), he drifted away from the Centro in order to direct several of his own plays and actively participate in the cabaret theater culture thriving in Rome in that period. At the same time, he began freelancing as a screenwriter, eventually helping to write close to 20 Spaghetti Westerns, including classics of the genre like Duccio Tessari’s Una pistola per Ringo (A Pistol for Ringo, 1965) and Il ritorno di Ringo (The Return of Ringo, 1965) and Lucio Fulci’s Tempo di massacro (The Brute and the Beast, 1966). After many years of debate, it is now generally agreed that he also contributed significantly, although was

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never officially credited, to the two films that initiated the genre itself, Sergio Leone’s seminal Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) and Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965). While continuing to work as a screenwriter for others, in 1968 he also succeeded in making his solo directorial debut with the relatively unremarkable war movie Rose rosse per il führer (Code Name, Red Roses, 1968). A year later, he began to find something like his own distinctive voice in Brucia ragazzo brucia (Burn, Boy, Burn, 1969) and Amarsi male (A Wrong Way to Love, 1969), two films providing a very frank exploration of female sexual desire, groundbreaking for their time. In the same year, he directed his first poliziesco, I ragazzi del massacro (Naked Violence, 1969), an adaptation of Giorgio Scerbanenco’s novel of the same name. By this time, he had also established his own production company, Daunia 70, and for the next seven years, he was able to produce, write, and direct all of his own films, including the ones widely regarded as his best police action thrillers, Milano Calibro 9 (Caliber 9, 1972), Il boss (The Boss, 1973), Il poliziotto è marcio (Shoot First, Die Later, 1974), Colpo in canna (Loaded Guns, 1975), and I padroni della città (Rulers of the City, 1976). At the same time, he also penned polizieschi for other directors including Ruggero Deodato’s Uomini si nasce, poliziotti si muore (Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, 1976) and Romolo Guerrieri’s electrifying Liberi armati pericolosi (Young, Violent, Dangerous, 1977). After the controversial Avere vent’anni (To Be Twenty, 1978), in which female desire was once again frankly displayed (as in his early films, but here, with a sting in the tail, also brutally punished at the end), he directed a six-part television miniseries, L’assassino ha le ore contate (Countdown for the Next Killing, 1981). Three years later, he returned to the big screen with the less-than-impressive Razza violenta (The Violent Breed, 1984) and Killer vs. Killers (1985), the latter apparently intended, at least in part, as something of a homage to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Nevertheless, at this point, realizing that his best films were probably behind him, di Leo chose to retire from filmmaking altogether, preferring to devote himself to publishing erotic novels. DI PALMA, CARLO (1925–2004). Cinematographer and director. Widely respected as one of the leading cinematographers of the entire postwar period, Di Palma studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia while working as camera operator and assistant to Aldo Tonti on a number of films, including Luchino Visconti’s groundbreaking Ossessione (1943). After the war, he served a further apprenticeship with many of the established cinematographers, including Ubaldo Arata, Carlo Montuori, and Gianni Di Venanzo before graduating to director of photography himself on Florestano Vancini’s remarkable first film, La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43, 1960).

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After establishing a solid reputation for his black-and-white photography on films such as Elio Petri’s L’assassino (The Assassin, 1961) and Giuliano Montaldo’s Tiro al Piccione (Pigeon-Shoot, 1961), Di Palma soared to international fame with his work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in color, Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), reaffirmed two years later with Blow-Up (1966). He subsequently contributed a very distinctive look to many of the films of the commedia all’italiana, working on, among others, Mario Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol, 1968), Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia (Jealousy, Italian Style, 1970), and Dino Risi’s Noi donne siamo fatte cosi (That’s How We Women Are, 1971) before directing three films himself, all starring his then partner Monica Vitti: Teresa la ladra (Teresa, the Thief, 1973), adapted from a novel by Dacia Maraini; Qui comincia l’avventura (Blonde in Black Leather, 1975), a female road movie that in many ways uncannily anticipated Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991); and Mimì Bluette, fiore del mio giardino (Mimi Bluette, 1976). Nevertheless, Di Palma will probably be best remembered for his stunning cinematography on many of Woody Allen’s films, beginning with Hannah and Her Sisters (1984) and continuing through Radio Days (1986) and Shadows and Fog (1991) to Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and Deconstructing Harry (1996). During a distinguished career that spanned a half century and more than 50 films, Di Palma won many prizes, including four Nastri d’argento and a BAFTA nomination. In 2003, he was also honored with the European Film Award for Achievement in World Cinema. DI VENANZO, GIANNI (1920–1966). Cinematographer. One of the most lauded cinematographers of the postwar period, Di Venanzo served an early apprenticeship as camera assistant to Aldo Tonti on Luchino Visconti’s landmark film Ossessione (1943), and in the immediate postwar period he was assistant to Otello Martelli and G. R. Aldo on many of the classic Neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). He graduated to director of photography on Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951) and thereafter worked on more than 40 films with most of the leading Italian directors including Luigi Comencini, Lina Wertmüller, Federico Fellini, and Mario Monicelli, for whom he photographed the legendary I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958). He developed an especially strong partnership with Michelangelo Antonioni, with whom he worked on all the latter’s early black-and-white films, with the exception of L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960), and with Francesco Rosi, for whom he photographed all the films up to and including Le mani sulla città (Hands

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over the City, 1963) being awarded the Nastro d’argento for his cinematography on I magliari (The Magliari, 1959) and again for Salvatore Giuliano (1962). A particularly innovative and creative cinematographer, Di Venanzo experimented with lighting and new techniques to develop a highly distinctive personal style that was nevertheless flexible enough to serve both the austerity of Antonioni’s La notte (The Night, 1961) and the sumptuousness of Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). Following his tragically premature death from cancer in 1966, he was awarded a posthumous Nastro d’argento for his color photography on Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965). DIRITTI, GIORGIO (1959–). Director, screenwriter, editor, and novelist. Originally more drawn to the theater and to popular music, Diritti worked for a period as a sound and recording technician and as the manager for a Bolognese pop group. A fortunate encounter with the assistant director of one of Pupi Avati’s films led to learning the ropes of filmmaking while serving as a voluntary assistant on several of Avati’s films. After a further period spent with Ermanno Olmi at his film school, Ipotesi Cinema, Diritti began making shorts and several films for television. In 1996, he founded his own independent production and distribution company, Aranciafilm, and with it continued to make documentaries for television while attempting to finance his first feature. Finally reaching the screens after a difficult period of gestation and, in the end, completely self-financed, Il vento fa il suo giro (The Wind Blows Round, 2005) was hailed as a revelation. A story that explored the limits of acceptance and tolerance for the outsider in a closed mountain community in the Piemonte region, Il vento proved to be an extraordinary success. Released in only seven copies with little advance publicity beyond word of mouth, and spoken completely in dialect with subtitles, the film won the Grand Prix at the Annecy Film Festival and, in Italy, was nominated for five David di Donatello and four Nastro d’argento awards. It screened continuously at the prestigious Cinema Mexico in Milan for more than a year. Four years later, Diritti’s second feature, L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come, 2009), a heartrending film about the notorious Marzabotto massacre carried out by retreating SS soldiers and die-hard Fascists during the Second World War, all seen through the eyes of a young girl, was also a huge critical and box office success. The film won eight David di Donatello awards and four Nastro d’argento awards, and at the Rome Film Fest that year, Diritti, as director, received the Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Special Jury, Golden Marc’Aurelio, and Audience awards. After a period directing several theatrical productions that effectively intertwined found-film, photographs, music, and live performance, Diritti produced his third feature, Un giorno devi andare (There Will Come a Day,

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2013). Recounting an agonizing journey into the jungles of South America by a young woman in search of herself, the film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and in Italy earned its lead, Jasmine Trinca, the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. In a pause from filmmaking, in 2014 Diritti published his first novel, Noi due (We Two) and, a year later, L’uomo fa il suo giro (The Man Makes His Rounds), a book of stories, anecdotes, and revelations about his filmmaking practice. In the same year, he also contributed the segment “Cielo” to Milano 2015, an ensemble documentary made to celebrate the city in all its many aspects. His recently released fourth feature, Volevo nascondermi (Hidden Away, 2020), in which Elio Germano stars as the troubled naif painter, Antonio Ligabue, has in Italy been awarded a Special Nastro d'argento, with Germano's performance also winning him the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. DOCUMENTARY. Although subsequently often relegated to the status of poor cousin of the fictional feature film, the documentary held pride of place in the early years of the Italian cinema. Indeed it would appear to have been the commercial success in 1904 of his first two documentaries—La prima corsa automobilistica Susa-Moncenisio (The First Car Race between Susa and Moncenisio) and Le manovre degli alpini (The Alpine Maneuvers)—that prompted the Milanese optical equipment merchant Arturo Ambrosio to establish Ambrosio Film, the production company that would soon become one of the major pillars of the Italian film industry in the early silent period. Other early film pioneers like Luca Comerio remained firmly devoted to the documentary even during the full bloom of the fiction film. Ambrosio’s close collaborator and cinematographer, Roberto Omegna, directed dozens of fictional features at the Ambrosio studios, but he became best known for exotic nature and ethnographic documentaries such as La caccia al leopardo (The Leopard Hunt, 1909), Usi e costumi abissini (Abyssinian Customs, 1908), and Elefanti al lavoro (Elephants at Work, 1911). In 1911, Omegna’s remarkable nature study, La vita delle farfalle (The Life of the Butterfly), was awarded first prize in the documentary film section of the Turin International Exhibition by a jury that included Louis Lumière and Paul Nadar. In the same period, another Ambrosio cinematographer and collaborator, Giovanni Vitrotti, also produced numerous documentaries while traveling extensively through Russia and the East. The documentary came to be somewhat marginalized during the golden age of the Italian silent cinema when it was overshadowed by the grandeur of the spectacular Greco-Roman epics and the passionate diva melodramas. However, as the Italian feature film industry initiated its steep decline in the early 1920s, there was a marked resurgence of interest in using the cinema for informational and educational purposes. The result was the establishment in 1924 of l’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (Union of Educational

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Cinematography), better known by its acronym LUCE. In 1925, LUCE was nationalized and thereafter functioned as the chief instrument for propaganda and consensus building of the Fascist regime, especially through its newsreels and reports, which, from 1926 onward, were required by law to be screened before every feature. Nevertheless, LUCE also hosted a number of technical departments, including a science unit directed by none other than Roberto Omegna and which thus continued to turn out first-rate and awardwinning scientific documentaries throughout the years of the regime. LUCE remained the exclusive producer of documentaries in Italy until the early 1930s when, following the death of Stefano Pittaluga, Emilio Cecchi took over as artistic director at the Cines studios and began to encourage artistic and experimental documentary filmmaking alongside the production of fictional features. During Cecchi’s brief reign, 17 documentaries were made at the Cines, including Aldo Vergano’s I fori imperiali (The Imperial Forums, 1932), Umberto Barbaro’s Una giornata nel cantiere di Monfalcone (A Day in the Monfalcone Shipyard, 1932), Alessandro Blasetti’s Assisi (1932), and Francesco di Cocco’s Il ventre della città (The Belly of the City, 1932), a remarkable exploration of Rome’s abattoir and its central fruit and vegetable market. In 1938, LUCE’s dominance over documentary filmmaking in Italy was eroded further with the birth of Industria Cortometraggi (Short Film Industry), which soon became well known for its La Settimana INCOM (INCOM Weekly) newsreels. The heightened competition prompted a rise in the quality of documentaries during this period, resulting in first-rate works such as Giacomo Pozzi Bellini’s Il pianto delle zitelle (The Spinsters’ Cry, 1939), Francesco Pasinetti’s Venezia minore (Venice in a Minor Key, 1942), and Fernando Cerchio’s Comacchio (1942). It was also during this period that Luciano Emmer made the first of what would become a long series of acclaimed art documentaries with Racconto da un affresco (Story of a Fresco, 1938–1941), and Michelangelo Antonioni began filming his Gente del Po (People of the Po), a stunning portrait of hardship and misery in the Po delta, which was interrupted by the war but eventually completed and released in 1947. In the immediate postwar period, a widespread desire to bear witness to recent history produced a number of documentaries celebrating the Resistance movement, foremost among them the collaboratively directed Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory, 1945). The documentaristic tendency also naturally spread and found a place in the fictional features that came under the banner of Neorealism. However, the greatest boost to medium- and full-length documentary filmmaking was provided by the Italian government itself, which in 1947 passed a law that introduced both a significant financial subsidy to documentary film producers and a legal obligation on exhibitors to screen nationally produced documentaries together with feature films on at least 80 days each year. The immediate result was a massive increase in the annual

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number of documentaries, rising from roughly 250 in 1948 to 1,150 in 1955, the year in which the law was due to expire (it was, in fact, extended until 1962). This vast expanse of production was uneven in quality, and some of it was undoubtedly motivated by largely commercial considerations on the part of fly-by-night producers. Nevertheless, many of the short- and mediumlength documentaries made under this dispensation also represented the first testing ground and apprentice work of future auteurs like Valerio Zurlini, Florestano Vancini, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, not to mention two filmmakers who would remain dedicated documentarians, Vittorio De Seta and Luigi Di Gianni. By the end of the 1950s, Roberto Rossellini also turned to the documentary, beginning his move away from film to television with the 10-episode L’India vista da Rossellini (India Observed by Rossellini, made 1957–1958, broadcast 1959). Indeed, with the abandonment of the screen quota for documentaries in the early 1960s, the greater part of documentary production inevitably came to gravitate toward the small screen. The genre continued to flourish in Italy in the early 1960s not only in the more traditional forms of the nature and travel documentaries of Folco Quilici but also in the more hybrid forms of Ugo Gregoretti’s I nuovi angeli (The New Angels, 1962) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964). An even more audacious transformation of the genre into what came to be known as the “shockumentary” was enacted in the crowded series of “mondo” films, beginning with Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo cane (A Dog’s World, 1962) and continuing through his La donna nel mondo (Women of the World, 1962), Africa addio (Africa Blood and Guts, 1966), and Addio zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom, 1971), as well as in the plethora of other “show and shock” films, such as Gianni Proia’s Mondo di notte 3 (Ecco, 1963), Marco Vicario’s Il Pelo nel mondo (Go! Go! Go! World, 1964), Paolo Cavara’s L’occhio selvaggio (The Wild Eye, 1967), and Luigi Scattini’s Svezia: Inferno e paradiso (Sweden: Heaven and Hell, 1965). After a host of small-budget pro-labor and agitprop films made in the wake of the 1968 uprisings, and auteurist documentaries such as Antonioni’s Chung-Kuo Cina (China, made in 1972 but first broadcast on Italian television in 1973), documentary production in Italy declined to a trickle by the end of the 1970s. After two decades of relative neglect, however, the documentary returned in force to Italian screens in the mid-1990s. In 1994, the year that marked the beginning of the undeniable resurgence of the form in Italy, the Fondazione Libero Bizzarri instituted an annual film festival and prize in order to showcase and encourage documentary filmmakers. In the same year, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia also established its first course in documentary cinema, and the influential Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (National Union of Italian Film Critics) united with the Florence-based Festival dei popoli (Festival of Peoples) in

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publishing a white paper on the state of Italian documentary. An even greater boost to documentary filmmaking was provided by the pay satellite television channel Telepiù, which from 1998 onward bought and broadcast the work of both established and up-and-coming Italian documentarists such as Daniele Segre, Daniele Incalcaterra, Gianfranco Pannone, Alessandro Rossetto, Daniele Vicari, and Stefano Missio. Interest in, and production of, documentary films has continued to grow in Italy in the new millennium to the point where many critics have taken to speaking about a vogue. In the year 2000, Stefano Missio and Francesco Gottardo established the dedicated website www.ildocumentario.it, which has continued to grow and flourish ever since, and three years later more than 250 Italian documentarists came together to form their own professional association, Doc/it., which became an influential lobby group with both government film authorities and RAI television. With annual documentary film festivals such as the RomaDocFest now as eagerly awaited as Venice or Cannes, the documentary has never been in better health in Italy since perhaps the very earliest days of silent cinema. See also MARAZZI, ALINA (1964–); MARCELLO, PIETRO (1976–); MINGOZZI, GIANFRANCO (1932–2009); PIAVOLI, FRANCO (1933–); QUATRIGLIO, COSTANZA (1973–). DON CAMILLO. Character and film series. A French–Italian coproduction directed by Julien Duvivier, Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1952) was the first of a series of five films made between 1952 and 1965 based on the popular comic stories of journalist and humorist Giovanni Guareschi. Recounting endless variations on a never-ending tussle in a small town in the Po Valley between the hotheaded but lovable parish priest, Don Camillo, and his eternal adversary and the town’s Communist mayor, Peppone, the films all starred veteran French actor Fernandel (Fernand Contandin) as the irrepressible and wily priest and Gino Cervi as his bullheaded nemesis. The enormous and unexpected box office success, both in Italy and abroad, of the first film, which had ended with Don Camillo being exiled from the village by the bishop for his irascible behavior, led to the pugnacious priest being brought back almost immediately in Il ritorno di Don Camillo (The Return of Don Camillo, 1953), also directed by Duvivier and scoring a similar worldwide success. The popularity of the characters was renewed with the next two films of the series, Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round, 1955) and Don Camillo monsignore ma non troppo (Don Camillo: Monsignor, 1961), both directed by Carmine Gallone, and again with Il compagno Don Camillo (Don Camillo in Moscow, 1965), directed by Luigi Comencini, in which the fiercely anti-Communist Don Camillo goes so far as to undertake a trip to Soviet Russia in order to thwart what he regards as Peppone’s evil plans.

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A sixth film in the series, also to feature the winning Fernandel-Cervi combination, was begun in late 1969 but abandoned when Fernandel was forced to withdraw from the project due to ill health. In 1972, veteran director Mario Camerini took up the challenge and made Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (Don Camillo and Young People Today, 1972), with Gastone Moschin and Lionel Stander as Don Camillo and Peppone, respectively, but the resulting film provoked little interest. A last attempt to revive the character was made in the early 1980s by Terence Hill, who directed himself in the lead of Don Camillo (The World of Don Camillo, 1983), with Colin Blakeley playing Peppone. The film more resembled Hill’s Trinity Westerns than the earlier Don Camillo films and consequently sank without a trace. DONAGGIO, PINO (1941–). Musician, singer-songwriter, and film composer. After completing his studies of the violin at the Conservatories of Venice and Milan, Pino Donaggio, born Giuseppe Donaggio, played with I Solisti Veneti before being drawn to popular music. He made an impressive debut at the Sanremo Festival of 1961 singing his own composition, “Come sinfonia” (Like a Symphony). In the following years, he became a regular at the Sanremo Festival, scoring his greatest triumph in 1965 with the song (lyrics by Vito Pallavicini) “Io che non vivo “(I Who Do Not Live). Although the song failed to win the top prize at the festival, it soon became an international hit when sung with English lyrics by Dusty Springfield as “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” The song has subsequently remained one of the most covered love songs in the popular repertoire, sung and recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley to the Hong Kong songstress Frances Yip, who recorded it in Mandarin. Donaggio’s extensive composing for film—currently more than 200 credits for films, telefilms, and television series—began in 1973 when he was asked to provide the score for Nicholas Roeg’s mystery thriller Don’t Look Now. He soon established what would be a long-term professional relationship with Italian American director Brian De Palma, beginning with the music for Carrie (1976) and continuing with scores for Home Movies (1979), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), and Passion (2012). His international reputation as a composer for the horror thriller was confirmed by his work on Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981). At the same time, he had also begun working with Italian directors, scoring, among others, Marcello Aliprandi’s Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia (Smiling Maniacs, 1975), Un sussurro nel buio (A Whisper in the Dark, 1976), Senza buccia (Skin Deep, 1979), and Morte in Vaticano (Vatican Conspiracy, 1982). His international reputation for effectively scoring horror thrillers made him an obvious choice for Lucio Fulci’s Black Cat (1981), for Carlo Vanzina’s forays into the giallo in Sotto il vestito niente (Nothing Underneath, 1985) and Squillo (Call Girl, 1996) and an

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inevitable collaboration with Dario Argento on Trauma (1993) and Due occhi diabolici (Two Evil Eyes, 1990), the two-handed horror-fest Argento made in collaboration with the legendary George Romero. Brilliant at being able to use classically inflected romantic themes in order to generate suspense and fear, he also came to score many of Giuseppe Ferrara’s more socially committed films like Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair, 1986), Giovanni Falcone (1993), Segreto di stato (State Secret, 1995), I banchieri di Dio (The Bankers of God: The Calvi Affair, 2002), and Guido che sfidò le brigate rosse (Guido Who Challenged the Red Brigades, 2007), a film paying tribute to the union official who in 1979 had denounced the Red Brigades and been summarily executed by them. Donaggio’s score for Michele Placido’s Un eroe Borghese (Ordinary Hero, 1995) earned him a nomination for the David di Donatello, and a year later he won an Italian Golden Globe for his music for Claudio Fragasso’s Palermo Milano solo andata (Palermo–Milan One Way, 1996). While he often declared a preference for scoring films, from the beginning of the 1990s he also embraced working extensively with the national broadcaster, RAI, on a host of television miniseries, including Racket (1997, six episodes), Commesse (Shopgirls, 1999, six episodes), and the eight-episode Lo zio d’America (2002, reprised in three episodes, 2006). For almost two decades, he provided the music for the RAI’s long-running Don Matteo (Father Matteo, 2000–2019), a series in which veteran comic Western star Terence Hill plays a genial and quick-witted priest who helps the local police solve the crimes of the district. Most recently he has scored Terence Hill’s own directorial debut with the motorcycle road movie My Name Is Thomas, nominated for the David di Donatello for 2019. Despite being slightly overshadowed by Ennio Morricone as Italy’s greatest film composer, Donaggio’s contribution to cinema generally was acknowledged in 2012 by the prestigious World Soundtrack Career Award and, in 2017, by the Grand Prize of the City of Turin at the Turin International Film Festival. In 2018, he received his second Italian Golden Globe for his score for Paolo Franchi’s Dove non ho mai abitato (Where I’ve Never Lived, 2017) and, a year later, was given the Tenco Award for his entire career. DONATI, DANILO (1926–2001). Costume, art, and production designer. Widely regarded as the foremost costume designer of Italian postwar cinema, Donati studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before beginning his career by designing the costumes of a dozen operas and plays directed by Luchino Visconti, including productions of La traviata and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, both staged in 1955. Only a few years later, he moved into film with costumes for Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959). He subsequently provided the period costumes for Roberto Rossellini’s Vanina Vanini (1961) before beginning a long and fruitful collaboration

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with Pier Paolo Pasolini, working on all his major films and winning his first Nastro d’argento for the costumes for Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew, 1964). He also worked with Franco Zeffirelli, winning the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Zeffirelli’s production of Romeo and Juliet (1968), but perhaps most closely with Federico Fellini, providing the costumes as well as art direction and production design for Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1968), Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1972), Amarcord (1974), and Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976), the latter earning him not only two Nastri d’argento for both Costume and Production Design but also two BAFTA awards and his second Oscar. Having also designed the costumes for the science fiction fantasy Flash Gordon (1980), which brought him a further two BAFTA awards, Donati crowned what had been a truly illustrious career with four more David di Donatello awards for costume and production design on Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997) and Pinocchio (Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio, 2002). DUBBING. Ever since the arrival of sound, Italians have watched (or rather heard) all foreign-language films in their own language. The practice of dubbing foreign films, now not only accepted but generally demanded by Italian audiences themselves, was first imposed on the industry by a decree, signed by Benito Mussolini in 1927, that prohibited the screening of foreign films in their original languages. As more and more films came to be made in sound and the stock of silent films dwindled, the government’s intransigence created a crisis in the supply of films for exhibition. The only version of Hollywood films shown in Italy during the early sound period were either Italian-version films already dubbed by the major studios themselves in Hollywood (the quality of which was usually execrable due to the poor language abilities of the Italian–American voice actors employed) or muted versions in which the dialogue had been removed from the soundtrack, leaving only music and sounds, with the meaning of the dialogue conveyed by Italian intertitles. Given the dearth of films being produced in Italy at the time, Italian cinemas faced a desertion by cinemagoers. The American major, Paramount, had also established a facility at Joinville in Paris for the purpose of shooting the same film in several different languages, but a further Fascist law in 1933 prohibited even the projection of foreign films dubbed into Italian outside Italy. By this time, however, a dubbing unit had already been set up within the revived Cines studios in Rome under the directorship of Mario Almirante, an actor and screenwriter who had also directed some 20 films during the silent period. Among the first films to be dubbed at the Cines facility were René Clair’s À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us, 1931)—although the Italian title changed the plural “us” to the singular “me”—and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931) and Die Herrin von Atlantis (Queen of Atlantis, 1932). The first

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group of dubbers included Mario Ferrari, Olinto Cristina, Tina Lattanzi, Ugo Cesari, Gero Zambuto (later to direct Totò in his first film), Augusto Marcacci, and Camillo Pilotto (later to star in, among other significant films, Mario Camerini’s Il grande appello (The Last Roll-Call, 1936). There soon followed the establishment of other dubbing studios such as Fotovox, under the directorship of Franco Schirato, Fono Roma under Salvatore Persichetti, and Itala-Acustica, headed by Vincenzo Sorelli. In 1932, MGM set up its own Italian dubbing unit in Rome under Augusto Galli. After establishing the unit, Galli returned to the United States in 1935, leaving its management in the hands of Franco Schirato. Other American majors also established their own Italian dubbing units: Paramount, under the direction of Luigi Savini; Warner Brothers, under Nicola Fausto Neroni; and Twentieth Century Fox, under Vittorio Malpassuti. Given how widespread the practice had become, most critics came to accept dubbing as a necessary evil, and many reviews, even in specialized and academic journals such as Bianco e nero, regularly commented on the quality of the dubbing as part of their appraisal of the film in question. Nevertheless, some disquiet about the practice remained. In 1936, Luigi Chiarini spoke out against it in the pages of the film journal Lo Schermo, and soon thereafter Michelangelo Antonioni also criticized the practice in several articles published in the journal Cinema. In 1941, a survey promoted by Cinema found deep-seated and widespread opposition to the practice from many quarters. However, dubbing had by now taken firm root, and it was clear that audiences, at least, were unwilling to forgo the easy option it offered in comparison to subtitles. With the withdrawal of the American majors from Italy in the wake of the promulgation of the 1938 law giving monopoly control over distribution of all foreign films to the Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (National Film Industries Authority), there was a marked decrease in the number of foreign films circulating in Italy and thus in the need to dub them. The small number of American films that did screen in Italy during the war had been mostly dubbed in Hollywood and exhibited the same deficiencies as previous attempts in the early days of sound. The practice returned in earnest, together with the massive presence of the American majors, at the end of the war. In 1944, immediately following the liberation of Rome, a number of actors who had worked as dubbers before the war joined together to institute the Cooperativa Doppiatori Cinematografici (Cooperative of Film Dubbers), which was soon followed, under the initiative of film enthusiast Count Giacomo Giannuzzi Savelli, by the sister association Organizzazione Doppiatori Cinematografici (Organization of Film Dubbers). Ironically, a strong boost to the dubbing industry was provided not only by the huge influx of Hollywood films into Italy during this period but also by Italian-language Neorealist films themselves, since on-location shooting and the use of nonprofessional

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actors meant that most Neorealist films required the soundtrack and dialogue to be added in postproduction. All this experience led to Italian dubbing units becoming among the best in the world. Although films were now dubbed as a matter of course, the theoretical question of “to dub or not to dub” continued to be raised sporadically in film circles in the following years. In 1956, the journal Cinema took up the issue again in a two-part inquiry in which directors such as Vittorio De Sica declared their firm opposition to it in principle, despite having long practiced it themselves out of necessity (Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves had, of course, been dubbed by a professional actor). In February 1968, the authoritative journal Filmcritica carried the so-called Manifesto of Amalfi in which most of the major directors, among them Michelangelo Antonioni, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Lattuada, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, called for the complete abolition of the practice as the only way to ensure the survival of Italian cinema. This was followed by another extensive survey of major directors in Filmcritica in July–August 1970, which again reported strong opposition to the practice. None of this served to stem the tide, however, and by the 1980s, dubbing was such an inescapable feature of Italian cinema that the Rivista del cinematografo ran a dossier in its September–December issue of 1982 that demonstrated, with extensive documentation, the absolute professionalism and creativity of the practice, which had always been regarded as the Cinderella of the Italian film industry. The continuing, indeed increased, dominance over the Italian market by foreign films in the following two decades ensured that dubbing gained complete respectability. In certain cases during the 1990s, producers began to include the names of dubbers in the film’s credits. Consequently, dubbers in Italy have now achieved a status, if not a visibility, comparable to that of film actors themselves. Among the most respected names in Italian dubbing are Gualtiero De Angelis, Emilio Cigoli, Oreste Lionello (the Italian voice of Woody Allen), Tina Lattanzi, Maria Pia Di Meo, and Ferruccio Amendola (the Italian voice of, among others, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino). Among the famous Italian actors who have also worked as dubbers are Alberto Sordi (voice of Oliver Hardy and Robert Mitchum), Gino Cervi (the voice of Sir Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, and James Stewart), Giancarlo Giannini (voicing Malcolm McDowell and Harvey Keitel), Gigi Proietti (voicing Michel Piccoli, Helmet Berger, and Donald Sutherland), and Pierfrancesco Favino (voicing Daniel Day-Lewis, Vincent Cassel, and James Gandolfini).

E EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION. Theme. Paradoxically, one of the most striking features of the unified Italy, which eventually emerged out of all the nationalistic struggles of the so-called Risorgimento, was the veritable flood of departures from the peninsula. While, as recent historical research has underlined, Italians had always emigrated to some extent, the number of Italians leaving Italy in the years immediately following unification grew to massive proportions. Between 1876, when national record keeping was first instituted, and 1915, when Italy entered the First World War, some 14 million Italians departed Italy, more than half of them braving the perils and duress of a month-long transatlantic crossing in the hope of finding a better future for themselves and their families in the Americas. The First World War stemmed the outflow for the duration, but the end of the war saw departures momentarily increase again before the United States imposed strict quotas in 1921 and then effectively closed its doors to Italian migrants in 1924. By this time, Italy had a Fascist government that frowned on emigration, both because of a lowering of international standing and from a desire on the part of the Fascist administration to retain and utilize its labor force for its own national projects. A decade later, considering its nationbuilding phase complete and embarking on what would be a short-lived imperial project, the Fascist government did encourage a measure of controlled migration but almost exclusively to its own African colonies or to its ally, Germany. The end of the Second World War witnessed the onset of a third period of Italian mass migration, the external outflow originally directed largely to European countries such as France, Belgium, and Germany, whose proximity to Italy facilitated a high rate of returns, but increasingly in the 1950s crossing the oceans again to countries such as Argentina, Canada, and Australia, which, given the greater distance, almost guaranteed the relocation to be more permanent. The same period also saw a unprecedented amount of internal migration, with much of the population from the countryside throughout the peninsula relocating to the larger urban centers but a large proportion of the rural working population of the South in particular moving massively in a 181

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search of more remunerative work to the cities of the industrial triangle of the North. A failure by successive Christian Democrat governments to repeal Fascist anti-urbanization laws of the 1930s until 1961 meant that for a time much of this trans-regional demographic translocation was technically illegal so that southern migrants arriving in northern cities were vulnerable not only to traditional interregional prejudices but also to exploitation and extortion for their clandestine status. By the mid-1970s, however, outflows from the peninsula had reduced to a trickle and internal migration had stabilized, and within a decade, an Italy that had become accustomed for more than a century to think of itself as fundamentally a country of emigration found itself transformed into a target country of immigration. Contrary to a certain long-held belief in the failure of Italian literature of the post-unitary period to register the mass migration occurring at the time, more recent literary and historical researches have brought to light a deep interest and preoccupation in many quarters for the phenomenon. One of the first writers to engage with the theme was Edmondo De Amicis, author of the best-selling, and subsequently classic, schoolboy novel Cuore (Heart, 1886), which includes an extended account of a voyage to Argentina by a young Piemontese boy, searching for a mother who had emigrated there for work several years earlier, as one of the edifying monthly stories recounted by the charismatic teacher of the class whose activities the young first-person narrator was chronicling in the book. A daunting and desperate journey constantly threatened by obstacles and difficulties only at times alleviated by chance meetings with already-established Italian expatriates, the boy’s quest, titled Dagli Appennini alle Ande (From the Appennines to the Andes), nevertheless ends happily as, in keeping with the Romantic idealism that permeates the book, he is successfully reunited with his mother. Three years later, however, De Amicis published Sull’oceano (On the Ocean, 1989), a book-length account of a transatlantic crossing to Argentina that he had made personally four years earlier as a journalist on a ship carrying some 1,600 Italian migrants of various provenance and class, all hoping to make a better life for themselves far away from their homeland. This more extended and meticulously observed account of the trying month-long journey and its debilitating effects on the people undertaking it managed perhaps more accurately and more realistically to convey the complex mixture of desperation, angst, and blind hope involved in the act of emigration. De Amicis’s doleful characterization of the phenomenon—he had previously, in 1882, already published a poem titled Gli Emigranti (The Migrants) whose opening lines likened the spent eyes and pallid faces of crowded migrants waiting to board their ship to the looks of condemned men waiting to ascend the gallows—exerted a defining influence on subsequent writings, and on depictions generally, of the Italian migratory experience.

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It is thus not surprising that one of the first Italian films to engage with the theme of emigration was Dagli Appennini alle Ande, a fairly literal transposition into moving images of the story from De Amicis, Cuore, directed by Umberto Paradisi for the Turin-based Gloria Film in 1916. The theme, however, had already been broached a year earlier (and thus anticipating by two years Charlie Chaplin’s more famous The Immigrant) in actor and director Febo Mari’s L’emigrante (The Migrant, 1915). Starring legendary stage actor Ermete Zacconi, in his first screen role, Mari’s film recounted the voyage of a hardworking and mature-aged husband and father, Antonio, to a South American country, with the aim of earning enough money to be able, on his return, to lift his family out of poverty. His stay, however, in what one intertitle ominously calls “the land of the chimera” is shown as an unmitigated series of humiliations and exploitations. Hospitalized when part of the building in which he is working collapses, Antonio is not only not offered compensation but, being illiterate, is easily tricked into signing a renunciation of indemnity by the company’s lawyers. He thus returns to Italy poorer than when he left, only to find that his wife and daughter have moved away and his house no longer belongs to him. He eventually discovers that his daughter has married a nobleman and will now have nothing to do with him, although, following more woes, he does finally meet his aged wife again, and the two return to attempting to eke out an existence together, clearly chastened by the experience. In the same year, Gino Zaccaria had also tackled the theme in his Gli emigranti, made for the Ambrosio Film company of Turin. Adapted from a novel by Francesco Pastonchi, Zaccaria’s film furnishes a more optimistic view of emigration as it shows the surviving inhabitants of a natural disaster in an Italian mountain village undertake the perilous transatlantic crossing to South America where, after a number of setbacks, they largely succeed in setting up a new settlement in mountains that remind them of their former home in Italy. The notion of transoceanic emigration reappears tangentially two years later in Leopoldo Carlucci’s La flotta degli emigranti (The Migrant Fleet, 1917), although the film is an adaptation of a popular stage play by Vincenzo Morelli and the migrant fleet of the title is not a reality but merely a speculative money-making venture at the center of a network of political corruption and intrigue, which appears to be the play’s real subject. After this initial brief flowering, however, perhaps due in part to the crisis that engulfed the film industry in the 1920s and in part to the incoming Fascist administration’s hostility to emigration, there are very few films that engage with the issue in the following decade. Significantly, the theme makes a return in Giovacchino Forzano’s Camicia nera (Black Shirt, 1933). Made to celebrate the achievements of the first decade of Fascism, Forzano’s film attempts to humanize its subject by following the history and vicissitudes of a poor family living in the Pontine Marshes from 1914 to 1932. The guiding center

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of the extended family is an industrious and upright blacksmith who will soon go off to fight in the war and return—after having been wounded and then detained in a French hospital due to his loss of memory—as a hero. From the very beginning, the blacksmith’s sister and her husband openly voice their desire to emigrate, to abandon the malaria-infested marshes in order to see the rest of the world, but they are chided by the blacksmith who declares “Bisogna aver fede nella propria terra” (One needs to have faith in one’s own land). As the blacksmith dutifully goes to fight in the Great War, the sister’s family does in fact migrate, first to a northern city and eventually as far as Tunisia. Much of the latter part of the film is taken up with newsreel footage documenting the progress of reclamation of the marshlands and the gradual creation of the new district of Littoria, which is the real focus of the film, with Benito Mussolini’s speech inaugurating the new quarter clearly meant as its crowning moment. In the interstices of much documentary footage the film reintroduces the blacksmith and his family, now rejoined by the renegade sister and her family, in order to marvel at what has been achieved, allowing the stalwart smithy to repeat his lapidary adage: “bisogna aver fede nella propria terra.” The rebuke of emigration in Camicia nera comes to be articulated with more vehemence in the few subsequent films that broach the theme during the Fascist period, often clearly connoting an abandonment of the homeland ultimately needing to be redeemed by heroic sacrifice and death. Made in 1935 but set in the first great period of migration of the 1890s, Guido Brignone’s Passaporto rosso (Red Passport) is probably the only film during the Fascist era to assume the issue of migration as its central concern. A narrative very much in the De Amicis mold, it follows the fortunes of a young doctor, Lorenzo Casati, forced, as a result of his progressive political activism, to migrate to Argentina. On board ship, he reunites with an old friend, Antonio, and meets Maria Brunetta and her father, all of whose fortunes and subsequent struggles to survive in the new country the film follows. Eventually, after many trials and tribulations, Lorenzo and Maria marry and have a son whom they name Juan. At the outbreak of the First World War, Casati reveals himself to be an interventionist and attempts to drum up support for the cause within the Italian immigrant community, but his own son, having grown up believing himself to be Argentine, is uninterested. It is only when Casati himself enrolls as a volunteer that the son comes to be persuaded of the duty conferred on him by his Italian heritage. He thus enlists in his father’s stead, returns to Italy, and is subsequently killed at the battle of Carso. He is posthumously awarded a silver medal for valour and, crucially, the name on his tombstone will say Giovanni rather than “Juan,” thus fully reclaiming him for the homeland. A similar heroic sacrifice is exacted in Goffredo Alessandrini’s Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938). World War I fighter pilot Luciano Serra struggles to settle down to a civilian

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job in Italy after the war, and when his long-suffering wife takes their son and returns to live with her affluent parents, he decides to emigrate to South America. There his fortunes eventually improve, even if his work involves performing in a flying circus. After many years, he succumbs to the blandishments of a shady South American entrepreneur to attempt to gain real fame and fortune by making the first solo transatlantic air crossing. Delays and lack of funds almost cause him to give up the project, but a letter from his now adult son announcing his intention to enlist in the Italian air force prompts him to launch into his flight despite the unfavorable conditions. When contact with his plane is lost, he is presumed dead. However, he reappears in the second part of the film under an alias, fighting with the Italian colonial forces in Ethiopia. Wounded when the train carrying Italian soldiers and passengers is ambushed by Ethiopian rebels, Serra nevertheless manages to fight his way to an Italian plane that has also been brought down by the rebels only to learn that the wounded pilot is none other than his own son. With the last of his strength, he succeeds in flying the plane to Italian military headquarters, thus saving his son and alerting military command to the ambush before dying. The film concludes with the son proudly accepting the medal for bravery that has been awarded to the father. With Fascism gone, the end of Second World War saw a resumption of emigration from the peninsula, which soon came to find an echo on the silver screen. One of the first films to embrace the theme was Mario Soldati’s Fuga in Francia (Flight into France, 1948). Soldati had been a sometime supporter of Fascism, and Fuga, the story of a wanted former Fascist official attempting to flee to France under a false identity and exploiting a fortuitous encounter with three young Italian workers going in the same direction as added cover, was something of a gesture of expiation. As the group, having overcome a host of difficulties, nears the French border, the three begin to see through the official’s disguise and, after a frantic gun battle, are able to consign him to the French and Italian border guards. Significantly, the film ends with the official’s 10-year-old son, whom he had co-opted to accompany him as part of his disguise, refusing to recognize the official as his father, choosing instead to attach himself to the kindlier of the three Italian workers who, we have learned earlier in the film, had fought as a partisan and lost his own young son during the war. The conclusion of the film would thus seem to symbolically presage the inauguration of a new Italy. Having played the man who adopts the boy in Fuga in Francia, Pietro Germi went on two years later to direct Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950), one of the key films engaging the theme of migration in the immediate postwar period. As the name suggests, the film attempts to follow the fortunes of a large group of unemployed miners and various other poor inhabitants from a small village in Sicily as they embark on a journey through the peninsula in order to reach France, where they hope to find work.

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However, the path of hope soon turns into a via crucis as their phony migration agent abandons them when they reach Rome and the police, enforcing the Fascist laws still in place, attempt to forcefully repatriate them to their village. Defying the police and continuing north, the now much-reduced group finds temporary work on a farm but is then violently attacked by unionized farm workers of the district for undermining their strike. A much smaller group does eventually make it to the French border, but the clandestine migrant’s journey through Italy is shown to be as difficult as any transatlantic crossing of the previous century. But transatlantic migration had also resumed by this stage and was reflected in actor Aldo Fabrizi’s first attempt at directing himself, Emigrantes (Immigrants, 1948), in which a contemporary Roman family makes the journey to Argentina very much along the lines described by De Amicis 60 years earlier. A year later, Carlo Borghesio provided a more comic version of attempted emigration to South America in his Come scopersi l’America (How I Discovered America), a film that ends, rather pointedly, with the two male protagonists preferring to continue rowing their way back to Italy rather than being picked up by another Italian ship going to America. A tragicomic depiction of Italian resettlement in South America would surface again in Dino Risi’s later Il gaucho (1964). Intra-European migration soon found further echo in Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), which portrayed the loneliness and melancholy of Italian male-only enclaves struggling to make a living in a Germany still devastated by its recent history, and Luciano Emmer’s La ragazza in vetrina (Woman in the Window, 1961), a love story set in the context of the close to a half million Italian men who had gone to Belgium to work (and in many case die) in coal mines in the immediate postwar period. But it was the unprecedented internal migration that was most changing the face of Italy at the time, and the phenomenon received an early epic depiction in Luchino Visconti’s, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). A decade later, the more corrupting aspects of the Italian economic miracle and the human price paid in Italians’ race to affluence were given form in Ettore Scola’s Trevico Torino—viaggio nel Fiat-Nam (Trevico—Turin: Voyage in Fiatnam, 1973) and Lina Wertmüller’s Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (All Screwed Up, 1974). Less shrill in its denunciation, perhaps, than Wertmüller’s film, Luigi Comencini’s love story in Delitto d’amore (Somewhere beyond Love, 1974) was more successful in bringing out the paradoxical clash and confrontation of the different Italies, which was occurring in the process of so much translocation. The 1970s also saw Italian migration to Australia receive its filmic due in Luigi Zampa’s Bello onesto emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (Girl in Australia, 1971), and the particular features of the Italian experience of migration to Switzerland were documented in Franco Brusa-

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ti’s Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974). Giuliano Montaldo’s intensely moving Sacco e Vanzetti (Sacco & Vanzetti, 1971) was able to situate the drama of the well-known trial and execution of the two anarchists within the context of the growing hostility toward Italian migrants in the United States, which resulted in bringing down the shutters at Ellis Island at the very time when the two were making their final legal appeals against their death sentences, while Scola’s Permette? Rocco Papaleo (My Name Is Rocco Papaleo), made in the same year, was able to confirm that such hostility still remained only slightly under the surface in the America of the 1970s. At the same time, on the American side, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather saga (The Godfather, 1972, and The Godfather Part II, 1974) emerged to offer what was, at least at one level, an immigrant narrative, coming, after all, from the hands of an Italian American who was a descendant of southern Italians who had emigrated to America at the turn of the century. From this perspective, it has been argued that, indeed, most American Mafia films could be considered, at least to some extent, as variations on the theme of Italian immigration to the United States. This would appear to be borne out by the way in which migrant narrative effortlessly shades into gangster saga in both Pasquale Festa Campanile’s L’emigrante (Little Funny Guy, 1973) and Steno’s Anastasia mio fratello (My Brother Anastasia, 1973). Films portraying the Italian migrant experience would continue to appear, although more sporadically, into the new millennium, with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani recounting it in Good morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon, 1987) as the successful journey of two young Tuscan architects to California culminating in a creative collaboration on building the grandiose set of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916); Nello Correale portraying it in Oltremare—non è l’America (Overseas—It’s Not America, 1999), as the nowfamiliar desperate attempt by a group of poor Sicilian peasants to reach America, which, however, lands them no farther than the coast of Tuscany; and Emanuele Crialese presenting the traditional transatlantic crossing from Sicily to Ellis Island in the early 1900s in a magic-realist key in Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006). Nevertheless, although many Italians may not have immediately noticed it, from the mid-1970s returns and arrivals of foreigners had begun to outnumber departures, and Italy was being transformed from a country of emigration to one of immigration. A steady increase of the inflow of foreign workers in the following decade and a half, occurring in the absence of any laws or regulations but frequently sensationalized by media attention, began to generate a climate of fear and hostility toward the new arrivals, prompting the government to finally attempt to provide a regulatory framework with the Martelli Law of 1990. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the increased arrival of refugees fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, dramatically

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emblematized for Italians in the two overcrowded shiploads of Albanians landing in Puglia in 1991, only increased Italian fears of being invaded by foreigners, leading to a widespread maltreatment of the immigrants, which, ironically, replayed the harsh treatment to which Italians themselves had been subjected in the previous century. The first film to engage squarely with the new immigration, and with the different Italy that was emerging in the process, was Pummarò (Tomato, 1990), directed by actor Michele Placido in his directorial debut. The film follows Kwaku, a young medical graduate from Ghana, in his attempt to visit his elder brother, Job, already in Italy and working as a tomato picker in the area outside Naples (hence his nickname, meaning “tomato” in the Neapolitan dialect). On his arrival, Kwaku discovers that, following an altercation, his brother had stolen a truck from the camorristi, who were managing the agribusiness, and fled north. Needing to find the money to buy a permesso di soggiorno, which will allow him to stay in the country, Kwaku begins to work illegally and soon discovers the humiliation and exploitation to which foreign immigrants are subjected in an allegedly hospitable host country. Continuing in his attempt to track down his brother, Kwaku ends up in Verona, where, through the good graces of a fellow Ghanaian, he finds hard but legal work in a foundry and initiates a warm relationship with a local woman who runs Italian classes for immigrants. This oasis of hospitality is shattered, however, when out together one evening the couple is violently attacked by a gang of locals on motorcycles who barrage them with racist taunts. Kwaku leaves in order to follow his brother’s tracks to Frankfurt, where he eventually arrives to find that his brother has been killed in a knife fight with two locals, and he is now required to identify the body. The film ends on a slightly positive note in that Kwaku learns that his brother is leaving behind a Ghanaian woman in Italy who is pregnant with his child, but in the meantime, the film has provided a powerful portrait of an intolerant Italy inhospitable to foreign migrants. A year after the release of Placido’s film, there was further confirmation of Italian hostility to foreign arrivals when the Albanian cargo ship Vlora— overloaded with an estimated 20,000 young people recently freed from the tyranny of a Communist dictatorship and attracted by the affluent Italy they had seen on the Italian television programs they had secretly watched for years—arrived unannounced in the southern port of Bari. Instead of being welcomed, the would-be migrants were forcibly detained in a disused football stadium for several days before being repatriated en masse to their poverty-stricken homeland. The incident appeared to many to graphically illustrate the notion that Italy was under invasion from foreigners, ironic, in this case, not only because Italians had for so long come to brandish their own

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history of emigration as a badge of courage but also because Italy had itself invaded Albania a half century earlier and forcibly annexed it as part of its colonial empire. Gianni Amelio included historical newsreel footage of that invasion in his Lamerica (1994), a film that sought not only to underscore Albania’s historical ties to Italy but also to remind Italians that an affluent Italy was now for the poverty-stricken Albanians what America had been for the many thousands of Italians undertaking that desperate transatlantic crossing a century earlier. The film achieved its aims by a genial narrative stratagem whereby the young Italian protagonist, now penniless and without a passport, is obliged to become just one of the shipload of illegal Albanian immigrants steaming toward Italy. A decade later, when the Bossi-Fini Law had entrenched an even greater hostility to undocumented arrivals to Italy, Marco Tullio Giordana engineered a similar stratagem in his Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005) in which the only young son of a wealthy Milanese couple falls overboard from a luxury sailing boat and is only saved from drowning by the heroic action of a young Romanian refugee and his sister who are part of large group of undocumented migrants being ferried to Italy by two unscrupulous people smugglers. The boy soon understands that to avoid being held to ransom, or worse, by the ruthless people smugglers he must pass himself off as a poor unaccompanied foreign minor, which means he lives the ordeal of the dangerous journey exactly as if he were a poor asylum seeker. In the meantime, a growing number of both established and up-and-coming Italian filmmakers attempted to portray the day-to-day struggle against hostility and discrimination of both regular and clandestine immigrants in Italy in films ranging from Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1998), Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 2006), and Vittorio De Seta’s Lettere dal Sahara (Letters from the Sahara, 2006) to Matteo Garrone’s Terra di mezzo (Land in Between, 1996), Carlo Mazzacurati’s Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast, 1996), and Francesco Munzi’s Saimir (2004). With typical creative flair, Roberta Torre engaged with the issue of the African migrant presence in Sicily with a postmodern variation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in her musical burlesque Sud Side Stori (South Side Story, 2000). Responding to the harsher laws introduced by the Berlusconi government in 2009, which included criminal sanctions for the harboring of illegal immigrants, films like Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) and Ermanno Olmi’s Il villaggio di cartone (The Cardboard Village, 2012) continued to advocate solidarity and hospitality. Perhaps most significant in this regard was Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016), a portrait of daily life on the frontline island of Lampedusa, the inhabitants of which had continued to react with equanimity, tolerance, and humanity to the thousands of desperate

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immigrants coming through from Africa in the hope of finding a better life in Europe. The film not only won the Golden Bear in competition at the Berlin Film Festival and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary but also was screened in April 2016 at a full meeting of the European Parliament. Ironically, by this time, official figures were showing that the growing number of Italians leaving the country in the wake of the 2009 global financial crisis had begun to regularly outnumber returns and foreign arrivals, suggesting that, in the second decade of the new millennium, Italy had become a country of emigration and immigration combined. EMMER, LUCIANO (1918–2009). Documentarist, screenwriter, and director. A passionate art lover, Emmer began what would become a lifelong engagement with the art documentary in the late 1930s with Raccconto da un affresco (Story of a Fresco, 1938–1941), a detailed study of Giotto’s work in the Cappella degli Scrovegni. After a host of acclaimed documentaries, including Isole nella laguna (Islands of the Laguna, 1948), for which he was awarded a Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary, in 1950 he directed his first fictional feature, Domenica d'agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), a charming set of intertwining stories of Romans going to the beach on Sunday. In the next decade, he alternated documentaries on artists such as Goya and Picasso with a half dozen well-structured and generally lighthearted feature films, among them Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris Is Always Paris, 1951), Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952), Terza liceo (High School, 1954), and Il momento più bello (The Most Wonderful Moment, 1957). After being forced by the censors to cut some key sequences from his La ragazza in vetrina (Woman in the Window, 1961), Emmer decided to abandon cinema for television, where he achieved wide renown for his creative and innovative shorts for the national advertising program Carosello, one of which involved filming contemporary Italian artists such as Renato Guttuso in their studios while they executed a drawing in two minutes. After almost three decades of successful television advertisements and high-quality documentaries, Emmer returned to the big screen with Basta! Ci faccio un film (Enough! I’ll Make a Film about It, 1990), which in some ways reprised the high school setting of his earlier Terza liceo. In the new millennium, alongside a number of didactic documentaries, Emmer directed three more features: Una lunga lunga lunga notte d’amore (A Long Long Long Night of Love, 2001); L’acqua . . . il fuoco (Three Women, 2003), which was awarded the Special Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Festival; and Le flame de paradis (The Flames of Paradise, 2006).

F FABRIZI, ALDO (1905–1990). Actor and director. Of modest workingclass origins, Fabrizi began acting in stage revues and cabaret in the 1930s, soon becoming famous for the endearing characters of his vaudeville routines. His first foray into cinema was in Avanti c’è posto (Before the Postman, 1942), directed by Mario Bonnard, which allowed him to transfer one of his stage personae to the screen. He played similar roles in Bonnard’s Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the Lady, 1943), set in the very workingclass area of Rome where Fabrizi was born, and Mario Mattoli’s L’ultima carozzella (The Last Wagon, 1943). Although he had already become widely known in Italy, he then came to international renown as the character of Don Pietro, the courageous priest who lends his support to the Resistance movement and pays the price, in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945). After more leading roles in Neorealist films such as Luigi Zampa’s Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947), he also tried his hand at directing, with Emigrantes (Immigrants, 1948), La famiglia Passaguai (The Passaguai Family, 1951), and Il maestro (The Teacher and the Miracle, 1957), generally regarded as his best self-directed film. He returned to comedy in a number of films with Totò but also continued to do stage comedy and revues. In 1964, he scored a great triumph on Broadway when he was hailed as a comic genius for his interpretation of the role of Mastro Titta in Pietro Garinei and Sandro Giovannini’s musical comedy Rugantino. His last film appearances were as the Governor in an adaptation of the Tosca story directed by Luigi Magni in 1974, as well as the grotesquely overweight wealthy father-in-law in Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974), for which he received the Nastro d’argento as Best Supporting Actor. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was awarded a David di Donatello for career achievement. His iconic status as one of the great actors of the Italian cinema was further confirmed in 1996 when the Italian postal service issued a stamp in his honor.

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FAENZA, ROBERTO (1943–). Director and screenwriter. Born in Milan, Faenza moved to Rome to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he graduated in directing in 1965. In 1968, while still completing a doctorate in political science, he made his first film, Escalation (1968), the story of a bitter, no-holds-barred struggle between a wealthy businessman and his nonconformist hippie son, which eventually escalates into brutal murder. This was quickly followed by an even more ferocious attack on bourgeois conformism in H2S (1971), a futuristic dystopic fantasy whose name appropriately alludes to the chemical formula for sulfuric acid. The film’s caustic nature provoked the ire of the censors, who delayed its release by almost two years. In the meantime, Faenza moved to the United States, where he lectured on mass media at Federal City College, Washington, DC. In 1978, having returned to Italy to teach at the University of Pisa, Faenza fired another broadside against the system with his ironically titled Forza Italia (Go Italy, 1978), a savage attack on the ruling Christian Democrat Party carried out through a careful montage of newsreel footage. This was followed by an even more ferocious critique of the Italian Communist Party in Si salvi chi vuole (Whoever Wants Should Save Themselves, 1980). After Copkiller (1982), a film shot entirely in English in the United States starring Harvey Keitel and Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), and Mio caro dottor Grasler (The Bachelor, 1989), adapted from a short novel by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, Faenza appeared to soften his tone considerably with Jona che visse nella balena (Look to the Sky, 1993). The moving adaptation of a biographical novel by Jona Oberski that recounted his experience as a young Jewish boy in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Jona earned Faenza much critical acclaim and a David di Donatello for direction. A now-mellowed Faenza followed this up with two further literary adaptations, Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Declares, 1995), from the best-selling novel by Antonio Tabucchi, and Marianna Ucria (1997), from a historical novel by Dacia Maraini. L’amante perduto (The Lost Lover, 1999) was also a literary adaptation but this time by Jewish writer Abraham B. Yehoshua, set against the background of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Prendimi l’anima (The Soul Keeper, 2003) was a similarly sensitive portrayal of the ill-fated love affair between psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and his young female patient, Sabina Spielrein. Two years later, Faenza returned to more socially committed themes in Alla luce del sole (Come into the Light, 2005), a passionate denunciation of the murder of parish priest Don Giuseppe Puglisi by the Mafia in Palermo in 1993. There followed more literary adaptations with I giorni dell’abbandono (The Days of Abandonment, 2005), from an early novel by Elena Ferrante, and I viceré (The Viceroys, 2007), adapting the 19th-century historical novel by Federico De Roberto, before a return to social critique in Silvio Forever (2011), an unauthorized documentary on the rise of media magnate and then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, using most-

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ly found footage. Made in the same year, in English as an American-Italian coproduction, the slightly zany coming-of-age film Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (2011), based on a novel by Peter Cameron, drew only a tepid reception in America but in Italy earned Faenza a shared Golden Globe for the screenplay. Three years later, he returned to the Shoah with Anita B. (2014), the story of a young Auschwitz survivor adapted from a novel by Edith Bruck, before coming forward to more recent times in La verità sta in cielo (The Truth Is in Heaven, 2016), a docudrama investigating the neverresolved disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi from Vatican City in June 1983. In 2017, he received a Special Nastro d’argento for his 50 years of filmmaking. FANDANGO. Production company. Founded by Domenico Procacci in 1989 as an independent film production company aiming to turn out quality cinema with a popular appeal, Fandango developed over three decades, always under Procacci’s direction, into a multimedia empire whose many activities now range over, among others, film and television production and distribution, book publishing, a web radio network, and a record label. The company also owns and manages the Politecnico cinema in Rome. Fandango scored an early success producing Sergio Rubini’s debut feature, La stazione (The Station, 1990), which saw Rubini awarded the David di Donatello for Best Emerging Director and Procacci nominated as Best Producer for both the David and the Nastro d’argento. Capitalizing on this early success, Procacci courageously founded a subsidiary of Fandango in Australia in order to coproduce a number of films with independent Australian producer and filmmaker Rolf De Heer. By Procacci’s own account, the abysmal box office performance of Rubini’s second feature, La bionda (The Blond, 1993), proved to be a serious setback for the company, but it eventually scored a coup in producing Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow, 1998), the first foray into feature filmmaking of popular rock singer Luciano Ligabue, before the overwhelming critical and commercial success of Gabriele Muccino’s enormously popular second feature, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss, 2001) returned the company to bouyancy. In the new millennium, the company was thus able to keep supporting the work of many of the most promising young filmmakers, producing films such as Paolo Sorrentino’s Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004) and L’amico di famiglia (The Family Friend, 2006) and Matteo Garrone’s Primo amore (First Love, 2004) before again scoring a huge commercial and critical success with Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008). As early as 2000, Procacci had also moved Fandango into distribution by founding Fandango Distribuzione and, a year later, achieved small-scale vertical integration by acquiring the Politecnico Cinema in Rome. In 2005, he established the recording label Radio Fandango. Having already secured a

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toehold in book publishing with Fandango Libri in 1998, in 2006 Procacci opened the Caffè Fandango, a bookshop and wine and food bar in the center of Rome, which, for several years, became the go-to venue for book launches and poetry readings. Six years later, he expanded the company’s presence in the book sector by buying up several other small publishers to create the listed Gruppo Fandango Editore, which, under the direction of Strega prizewinning novelist and translator Edoardo Nesi, has continued to publish a great range of the work of some of the most prominent Italian writers and graphic novelists. At the same time, in the last decade Fandango Film has continued to support both established directors such as Carlo Mazzacurati, Ferzan Ozpetek, Daniele Vicari and Francesca Comencini, while also producing the first features of emerging filmmakers such as Susanna Nicchiarelli, Rolando Ravello, and, more recently, the much-welcomed return to filmmaking of singer Luciano Lugabue with his third feature, Made in Italy (2018). Thanks to Procacci’s foresight in acquiring the rights to the novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Fandango has also most recently managed to achieve one of its greatest triumphs coproducing and distributing the overwhelmingly successful television series adapted from the first novel, L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2018), directed by Saverio Costanzo. The company’s current state and varied activities are now all accessible online on its webpage: https://www.fandango.it. FANTOZZI. Character. The best-loved of the many characters created by actor and writer Paolo Villaggio in eight books and 10 feature films all bearing his name, Fantozzi gradually emerged in the late 1960s in a series of monologues performed by Villaggio on the popular weekend television variety show Quelli della domenica (Sunday People). The growing popularity of the monologues on television prompted the editor of the weekly magazine L’Espresso, to make space for Villaggio to develop the character further in a weekly rubric titled La domenica di Fantozzi (Fantozzi’s Sunday). In 1971, encouraged by the publisher Angelo Rizzoli, Villaggio brought the pieces together in a volume simply titled Fantozzi. The comically wretched and downtrodden accountant, a born loser whose unsuccessful struggles with his superiors at work and daily life in general the book repeatedly chronicled, patently struck a chord with the public, and the book became an immediate best seller in Italy, where it sold well over one million copies, being soon also translated and issued in a dozen other languages, including Russian. In the wake of such overwhelming success, in 1974 Villaggio published the first of what would eventually be seven sequels under the title of Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The Second Tragic Fantozzi).

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A year later, with Villaggio furnishing the screenplay based on the first two books, Luciano Salce directed Villaggio himself as the hapless accountant in the first film of the series, Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975). The film repeated the success of the books and, despite scarce critical appreciation, became the highest-grossing film of year. This prompted Salce and Villaggio to immediately make Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976), which, despite having to compete that year with American blockbusters such as Jaws, The Godfather Part 2, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, still managed to climb to 11th place at the Italian box office. During the next two decades, but always directed by Neri Parenti, Villaggio would incarnate the hyperbolically inept and servile accountant in ever more absurd situations in seven other sequels: Fantozzi contro tutti (Fantozzi against the Wind, 1980), Fantozzi subisce ancora (Fantozzi Succumbs Again, 1983), Super Fantozzi (1986), Fantozzi va in pensione (Fantozzi Retires, 1988), Fantozzi alla riscossa (Fantozzi Strikes Back, 1990), Fantozzi in paradiso (Fantozzi in Heaven, 1993), and Fantozzi il ritorno (Fantozzi Returns, 1996). The swan song of the film series would be Fantozzi 2000—la clonazione (Fantozzi 2000— the Cloning, 1999), starring Villaggio as always, but directed by newcomer Domenico Saveri, in which Fantozzi is literally cloned back to life by the miracle of modern medicine in order to both afflict and suffer the world one last time. By this time, the adjective fantozziano (Fantozzi-like) had already entered the Italian language, finding a place in the major dictionaries and being employed even in the Italian Parliament as a term of ridicule. In 2017, Mario Sesti’s La voce di Fantozzi (The Voice of Fantozzi), a documentary on the character and his much-loved creator, was screened at the Venice Festival to great acclaim. In July of the same year at Villaggio’s crowded funeral in Rome’s Campidoglio, attended by all the great names of Italian stage and screen, well-known veteran actor and television presenter Michele Mirabella was seen to turn away, appalled, at an unknown woman’s request to be able to take a selfie with him, exclaiming to anyone who would listen that such a request at a funeral was really “fantozziana.” FAVINO, PIERFRANCESCO (1969–). Actor and dubber. Having nurtured a desire to act from a very early age, upon finishing high school, Favino enrolled to study at Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Art. While appearing in several stage productions, he also made his first appearance on the small screen in Alberto Negrin’s adaptation for television of Beppe Fenoglio’s Resistance novel Una questione privata (A Private Affair, 1993) and in the first season of the medical series Amico mio (1993–1994). Two years later, he also made his debut on the big screen in one of the episodes of Lino Capolicchio’s Pugili (Boxers, 1995). There followed minor roles in Marco Bellocchio’s Il principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1997) and Stefano Reali’s In barca a vela contromano (Physical Jerks, 1997) before

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more television work in a second season of Amico mio (1998) and a small part in Excellent Cadavers (1999), a telefilm on anti-Mafia crusaders Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino made in English for American television by Ricky Tognazzi. In the new millennium, Favino began to make his mark on the big screen playing Marco, the only member of the group to be in a stable marital relationship in Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss, 2001), and as the squad commander, Sergeant Rizzo, in Enzo Monteleone’s war drama, El Alamein—la linea del fuoco (El Alamein—the Line of Fire, 2002), the latter bringing him a first Best Supporting Actor nomination for the David di Donatello. After a number of other minor roles, he really came to the fore playing the part of Libano in Michele Placido’s crime epic Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005), a powerful performance that earned him a shared Nastro d’agento for Best Actor. Having by now achieved something of an international reputation, he appeared as not much more than a walking statue of Christopher Columbus in Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum (2006) but scored a much more significant role as Lord Glozelle in Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008). In the same year, he was called to play the heroic Italian Partisan leader Peppi Grotta in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008) before taking on the role of Inspector General Olivetti in Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (2009). A year later in Muccino’s Baciami ancora (Kiss Me Again, 2010), Favino was able to reprise the role of Marco that he had played in L’ultimo bacio, although, now 10 years later, facing the end of what had then been a happy marriage, before going on to play Cobra, the most ruthless and violent member of the feared Riot Squad in Stefano Sollima’s highly controversial A.C.A.B.—All Cops Are Bastards (2012). In the same year, demonstrating his trademark versatility, he also took on the role of Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist who dies in suspicious circumstances while in police custody, in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, 2012), while also appearing as one of the three separated middle-aged husbands forced to share a single apartment in Carlo Verdone’s comedy Posti in piedi in paradiso (A Flat for Three, 2012). After another excursion to America to be the race car driver Clay Regazzoni in Ron Howard’s Rush (2013), he returned to Italy to star as the violent debt collector Mimmo in Michele Alhaique’s Senza nessuna pietà (Without Any Pity, 2014). In something of a pause from filmmaking, Favino then made a return to the stage, directing and starring in Servo a due, an Italian adaptation of British playwright Richard Bean’s One Man Two Guvnors, itself an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century comedy Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters), before returning to the big screen as Filippo Mal-

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grati, the corrupt politician caught in the web of Stefano Sollima’s violent crime thriller Suburra (2015). He subsequently played the role of the Italian minister in Roberto Andò’s Le confessioni (The Confessions, 2016) and D’Artagnan in Giovanni Veronesi’s playful romp I Moschettieri del Re—la penultima missione (The King’s Musketeers: Penultimate Mission, 2018). In the same year, he was able to show the full range of his talents as an allround entertainer in cohosting the 2018 Sanremo Music Festival, at which he sang and danced with great aplomb but also recited a very moving monologue from Bernard-Marie Koltès’s one-act La nuit juste avant les forêts (The Night Just before the Forests), a play dealing with the complex theme of self and otherness. His most recent, and possibly greatest triumph, acknowledged with a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes, has been his appearance as former Mafia boss turned state’s witness Tommaso Buscetta in Marco Bellocchio’s Il traditore (The Traitor, 2019), a consummate performance that has been recognized with both the Golden Globe and the Nastro d’argento for Best Actor. He is presently reported to be working on a film with Gianni Amelio in which he'll play the part of former Italian Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi. A prolific and supremely versatile actor with almost 80 feature films and television series to his credit, Favino now also directs and teaches at the L’Oltranrno acting school in Florence, which offers free tuition to talented students in financial need. FELLINI, FEDERICO (1920–1993). Journalist, cartoonist, screenwriter, and director. The most nationally celebrated and internationally renowned of all Italian directors of the postwar period, Fellini was born and raised in the northern Italian coastal town of Rimini. From a very early age, he showed a flair for cartoons and, as a boy, was able to exchange amusing caricatures of Hollywood film stars for free admission to the local cinema. Having moved to Rome in 1938, ostensibly to study at the university, Fellini hawked his drawings around the city and soon became a regular contributor to the satirical journal Marc’Aurelio. The contacts he made at the journal opened up a range of possibilities for extra work, including writing skits for the radio, and it was while working on a radio program that he met the actress Giulietta Masina, whom he married in 1943. He was soon also following the example of other writers from Marc’Aurelio who moonlighted as assistant screenwriters for films being made in nearby Cinecittà, and his first acknowledged screenwriting credit was for Mario Bonnard’s Avanti c’è posto (Before the Postman, 1942), during the filming of which he met and befriended the actor Aldo Fabrizi. Fellini’s real entry into the film industry, however, came only after the liberation of Rome in June 1944 when he was approached by out-of-work director Roberto Rossellini to help write a documentary on a Catholic priest who had been killed by the Germans for

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his involvement with the Resistance. By this time, Fellini was making a good living from selling drawings and caricatures to Allied servicemen, but he accepted the offer and, together with established screenwriter Sergio Amidei, wrote what became the founding film of Neorealism, Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945). In the wake of the film’s overwhelming international success, he continued to work with Rossellini on the screenplay of Paisà (Paisan, 1946), parts of which he also directed, and on L’amore (Ways of Love, 1948), for which he not only wrote the second episode, “Il miracolo” (“The Miracle”) but also acted the role of the Stranger, opposite Anna Magnani. With his screenwriting credentials solidly established, he began to work with a number of other directors, including Pietro Germi and Alberto Lattuada, before returning to Rossellini to help write Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950). Having already collaborated with Lattuada on Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948), Fellini joined forces with the more established director to form a cooperative company with which to produce Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950), a film about a motley troupe of traveling players, which they codirected. The film flopped miserably at the box office but provided Fellini with the confidence and experience to direct his first solo feature, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952). A broad tongue-in-cheek satire on the photoromances so popular in Italy at this time, the film starred a young Alberto Sordi in a role that now seems made to measure; however, Sordi’s popularity was at a low ebb at the time, and the film proved to be another resounding flop. Undeterred, Fellini then made I vitelloni (1953). The story of five young middle-class layabouts in a provincial city that greatly resembled Fellini’s own native Rimini, I vitelloni was the first film to incorporate that dimension of poetic autobiography that would mark so many of his subsequent works. Winning the Silver Lion at the Venice Festival that year, it was Fellini’s first major success. While preparing for his next project, Fellini directed an episode for Cesare Zavattini’s compilation film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953). Fellini’s “L’agenzia matrimoniale” (“Matrimonial Agency”) was generally judged the best of the film’s six segments, but the film itself received scant notice and little acclaim. By this time, however, Fellini had already made what would be his first great international triumph, La strada (1954). A charming redemptive fairy tale in modern dress, the film was awarded the Silver Lion when it was first screened at the Venice Festival and soon accrued a veritable host of awards, which included not only the Oscar for Best Foreign Film but also a special prize from the Screen Directors Guild of America that was personally presented to Fellini by John Ford. After Il bidone (The Swindlers, 1955), a petty-crime drama that suffered from being edited in too much haste in order to be presented at Venice that year, Fellini

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scored another major international success with Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957). The story of a warmhearted prostitute who suffers at the hands of a cold-blooded world but whose basic goodness eventually wins out, the film was first shown at Cannes in 1957 to enormous acclaim, with Giulietta Masina winning the Best Actress award. It was also warmly received when later released in Italy as well as in the United States, where it received both the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the New York Film Critics Award. Fellini’s international reputation, already sky-high, was pushed to stratospheric heights with his next film, La dolce vita (1960). Although the title itself was ironic and the work was essentially a critique of the moral vacuum being created by the increasing affluence and the birth of a celebrity culture in Italy at the time, the film was largely read as a celebration of the hedonistic and desirable “good life” of the rich and famous. Initially vilified in Italy by Catholic and conservative elements, who thus helped make it a cause célèbre, the film eventually proved to be an unprecedented national and international success, winning the Palme d’or at Cannes and earning Fellini yet another Oscar nomination for Best Director.

Federico Fellini manhandling his alter ego, Marcello Mastroianni, on the set of La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

While searching for a subject for his next major work, Fellini filmed the delightful short “Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio” (“The Temptations of Doctor Antonio”) as his contribution to Boccaccio ’70 (1962), another compilation film organized by Zavattini, before making Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). The tragicomic and transparently autobiographical story of a successful film

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director crippled by indecision regarding his next film, 8½ proved to be another international triumph, winning two of its five Oscar nominations, seven Nastri d’argento in Italy, and the Grand Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival. Made two years later, Fellini’s first film in color, Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), had generated high expectations. In the event, however, despite praising its design, many of the Italian critics voiced disappointment, although the film proved to be very popular in the United States, where it was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and was nominated for two Oscars. While again exploring a number of projects for his next major work, Fellini made a brief excursion into the horror genre with “Toby Dammit,” his contribution to the omnibus film Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead, 1968), and then into television with Block-notes di un regista (Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, 1969), an hourlong program commissioned by the American NBC network. He returned to the big screen with Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969), a highly personal and fragmented dream vision of ancient Rome that provoked a varied reaction worldwide but nevertheless earned Fellini another Oscar nomination for Best Director. Following another excursion into television with I clowns (The Clowns, 1970), Fellini returned to paint an equally personal and impressionistic portrait of a more modern Rome in Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1972) before making his most autobiographical film, Amarcord (1973). With its title meaning, literally, “I remember” in Fellini’s native dialect, the film paraded a wonderful series of evocative but largely invented memories of provincial life in a Rimini of the 1930s, all created completely on the soundstages of Cinecittà. Critically and commercially successful worldwide, Amarcord brought Fellini the fifth Oscar of his career. There then followed what are generally, and perhaps unfairly, regarded as minor films in what already comprised an extraordinary body of work: Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976), his most expensive film up to that time but also one of his least popular; Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1979); La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980), which provoked the ire of feminists for what was seen as its caricature of women; and E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983). Then, after a hiatus during which he bowed to necessity and filmed eye-catching television advertisements for Barilla pasta and Campari liqueurs, Fellini returned to grand form with his mordant satire of Italian television in Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986). Having now been awarded the Golden Lion at Venice for his lifetime achievement, Fellini turned the limelight squarely back on himself in his next film, Intervista (Fellini’s Intervista, 1987), an amusing, and amused, portrait of himself and of Italian cinema, painted with all the assurance of an old master. Three years later, he made what would be his last film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990). Adapted from a fantasy novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni and with Roberto Benigni playing the young innocent, Ivo, the film re-presented

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many of the familiar Fellinian motifs in an ever more ethereal setting in order to express the consternation of an ingenue before the craziness of a postmodern world. While many critics expressed some reservations about the work and it failed, inexplicably, to find a distributor in the United States, it proved to be Fellini’s most popular film in Italy after Amarcord and, as such, a fitting conclusion, perhaps, for a director who always seemed to be looking at cinema through the eyes of an awed child. In 1993, shortly before his death, Fellini made the journey to Hollywood, where he was presented with an honorary Academy Award for his remarkable lifetime achievement. FERRERI, MARCO (1928–1997). Actor, producer, and director. One of the most iconoclastic directors of Italian postwar cinema, Ferreri began his film career in the early 1950s by collaborating on the production of current affairs documentaries. After acting as executive producer for Cesare Zavattini’s compilation film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953), Ferreri moved to Spain, where he began a long association with writer Rafael Azcona, making three films that anticipated the anarchistic black humor of his major films to follow: El pisito (The Apartment, 1958), Los Chicos (The Boys, 1959), and El cochechito (The Little Coach, 1960), the last being nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival that year. Returning to Italy in 1961, Ferreri contributed a short episode to the Zavattini-inspired compilation film Le italiane e l’amore (Latin Lovers, 1961) before making L’ape regina (The Conjugal Bed, 1963), a caustic satire on sex and marriage that immediately drew the ire of the censors, who forced changes on the film, including its title. Similar hostility from the censors greeted La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1964), although this did not prevent it from being nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and winning a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story. After “Il professore” (“The Professor”), one of the episodes of Controsesso (Countersex, 1964), and the four-part Marcia nuziale (Wedding March, 1965), another satire on modern Italian male-female relations, Ferreri ironically reversed the traditional malefemale positions in L’harem (The Harem, 1967), where the harem is made up of men. This provocative take on the gender wars was followed by the sardonic Dillinger è morto (Dillinger Is Dead, 1969); the apocalyptic Il seme dell’uomo (The Seed of Man, 1969); L’udienza (Papal Audience, 1972), a Kafkaesque tale in which an audience with the pope is forever forestalled; and then the film for which he would become most renowned, La grande abbuffata (The Grande Bouffe, 1973). The story of four culinary libertines who commit collective suicide by eating themselves to death, the film caused enormous controversy, especially in France, but it was also nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and, in the event, received the International Federation of Film Critics Prize.

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Director Marco Ferreri (circa 1970s). Courtesy of Photofest.

Continuing to play the agent provocateur, Ferreri made Non toccare la donna bianca (Don’t Touch the White Woman, 1974), a burlesque revisitation of the Western genre that restaged Custer’s Last Stand as a confrontation between the First and the Third World in the hollowed-out building site of Les Halles in Paris, before returning to the sex wars with L’ultima donna

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(The Last Woman, 1976) and the more surreal and apocalyptic Ciao Maschio (Bye Bye Monkey, 1978). The milder Chiedo asilo (Seeking Asylum, 1979), in which Roberto Benigni plays a lovable nursery school teacher, was followed by an adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s semiautobiographical novel Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1981), before Ferreri’s taste for the absurd returned to the fore in I Love You (1986), a portrait of modern alienation presented through the story of a man’s fetishistic sexual attachment to a talking keyring. The ironically titled Come sono buoni i bianchi (How Good the Whites Are, 1988) excoriated the well-meaning but ultimately self-serving stratagems of Western food aid to Africa while La casa del sorriso (The House of Smiles, 1991), a love story between an elderly couple set in an old people’s home, was refused a screening at Venice but awarded the Golden Bear when shown at Berlin. After La carne (The Flesh, 1991), another excessive love story, this time involving priapism and anthropophagy, Ferreri’s final film, Nitrato d’argento (Nitrate Base, 1996), was an affectionate homage to, and celebration of, silent cinema. A competent actor as well as director, Ferreri appeared in Luigi Malerba’s Donne e soldati (Women and Soldiers, 1954), acted in Mario Monicelli’s Casanova ’70 (Casanova 70, 1965), and played Dr. Salamoia in Ugo Tognazzi’s Il fischio al naso (The Seventh Floor, 1967), but he is probably best remembered for his screen appearance as the sardonic Hans Guenther in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (Pigpen, 1969). FERRETTI, DANTE (1943–). Art director and production designer. One of Italy’s most nationally respected and internationally renowned designers, Ferretti graduated in architecture from the University of Rome before embarking on a career in the cinema. Still in his early 20s, he began working as an assistant designer on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew, 1964) and Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) before becoming the principal production designer for Medea (1969) and for all of Pasolini’s subsequent films. In the following years, he worked with many of the other leading Italian directors, including Elio Petri, Luigi Comencini, and Marco Ferreri. In 1978, he initiated a very fruitful collaboration with Federico Fellini by creating the sets for Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal) and thereafter designed all of Fellini’s subsequent films. With his national reputation firmly established, in the 1980s he also began to work internationally and received a David di Donatello for his design of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986) and Oscar nominations for his work on Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). In the 1990s, he worked regularly as art director and production designer for Martin Scorsese and received Oscar nominations for his work on Scorsese’s Age of Innocence (1994), Kundun (1997), and Gangs of New York (2002). In

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2004, having already been nominated for an Academy Award six times, he finally received the Oscar for contribution to Scorsese’s The Aviator. His work on Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) earned him another Oscar for Best Achievement in Art Direction, shared with set decorator Francesca Lo Schiavo, which was repeated four years later with the Oscar both received for their stunning design of Scorsese’s Hugo (2011). After collaborating again on Kenneth Branagh’s production of Cinderella (2015), they both shared the Capri Hollywood Set Designs and Decorations Award for their work on Scorsese’s The Silence (2016). FILM COMMISSIONS. Organizational agency. Created in America in the late 1940s, Film Commissions are quasi-governmental organizational and administrative entities whose primary aim is to provide incentives to attract the business of filmmaking and multimedia production to a particular geographical location. In Italy, the Film Commissions are generally regional, but some are more specifically tied to particular cities or territories. Instituted in the late 1990s, most Italian Film Commissions began to operate in the first years of the new millennium. Their active role in Italian film production, ranging from financial contribution and facilitation of tax benefits to the supply of locations and logistical support, has grown substantially in the past two decades to the point where there are few films that are now released in Italy without an acknowledgment of the participation of the film commission of the respective area. The Association of Italian Film Commissions at present lists 17 members, correlated largely with the regions and with a nationally recognized legal status. However, it has been estimated that there may be as many as 50 commissions operating with a less defined legal status. Over and above the individual regional and local commissions, there is also the Italian Film Commission, which is a division of the Italian Trade Commission and operates to promote Italian audiovisual production and culture internationally. The Association of Italian Film Commissions has its own website at http:// www.italianfilmcommissions.it/en/. FLAIANO, ENNIO (1910–1972). Novelist, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. Flaiano began writing for films in the early 1940s and achieved an early success with the award of a Nastro d’argento for the screenplay of Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera (Rome: Free City, 1946). While continuing to pursue a literary career—he won the prestigious Premia Strega in 1947 with his novel Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill)—he also collaborated on numerous screenplays with many of the major directors, from Roberto Rossellini, for whom he helped write Dov’è la libertà? (Where Is Freedom,

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1954), to Michelangelo Antonioni, for whom he scripted La notte (The Night, 1960). His greatest screenwriting successes, however, came from his long association with Federico Fellini, with whom he worked on almost a dozen films, including La dolce vita (1960) and Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963), the latter earning him two Nastri d’argento as well as his third shared Oscar nomination. Following his untimely death, in 1973 a Premio Flaiano (Flaiano Prize) for screenwriting was instituted in his honor. In subsequent years, a growing recognition of Flaiano’s importance as a cultural figure has led to the Premio Flaiano coming to be extended, under the auspices of the president of the Italian Republic and the Ministry for Culture, into an annual two-month cultural festival held in his native city of Pescara, during which prizes are awarded in the fields of cinema, theater, narrative, poetry, and television. FONDATO, MARCELLO (1924–2008). Screenwriter and director. Fondato began his career in films as a screenwriter, collaborating with Luigi Comencini on a number of films, including Mogli pericolose (Dangerous Wives, 1958), Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), and La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl, 1964). After also working on some of the Totò films and cowriting several of Mario Bava’s horror classics, including I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath, 1963) and Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964), he made his directorial debut with I protagonisti (The Protagonists, 1968), a film about five wealthy tourists who pay to spend time with a notorious Sardinian bandit, which earned him a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story. Certo certissimo . . . anzi probabile (Diary of a Telephone Operator, 1969), adapted from a short story by Dacia Maraini, is usually regarded as his finest work as a director. However, he continued to write and direct a number of other successful films in the 1970s, including Causa di divorzio (Cause of Divorce, 1972), which reflected a burning issue in Italy at the time; Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo (Watch Out, We’re Mad, 1974), one of the films featuring the comic duo Bud Spencer and Terence Hill; and A mezzanotte va la ronda del piacere (The Immortal Bachelor, 1975), which took its title from a popular song of the 1930s. From the 1980s, he worked mostly in television, directing several popular miniseries, among them the six-episode Affari di famiglia (Family Affairs, 1989) and the three-episode Sì, ti voglio bene (Yes, I Love You, 1994). FRAMMARTINO, MICHELANGELO (1968–). Screenwriter, director, and visual artist. Born in Milan to parents who had migrated there for work from the region of Calabria, Frammartino studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic before also attending the Milan Civica Scuola di Cinema. While at the school, he brought his architectural background and his passionate

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interest in cinema together in the production of a number of short films and interactive multimedia installations that explored the relation between the image and time and space. His first full-length feature for the big screen came in 2003 with Il dono (The Gift, 2003), a closely observed documentary of life and customs in his parents’ native town of Caulonia. Produced with a budget of less than 5,000 euros and valorizing image, natural sounds, and silence over word and dialogue, the film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival before screening at the Annecy Italian Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix. Five years in the making and set in a similar southern Italian town, his second feature, Le quattro volte (2010), went further in its close documentation of peasant life and customs to become a meditation on the recurring cycles of life and death in the four realms of the human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Premiered at Cannes in the Directors Fortnight, the film was given the Label Europa Cinemas Award before winning, among others, both the Grand Prix and CICAE Award at Annecy, the Grand Prix at the Bratislava International Film Festival, and the CineVision Award at the Munich Film Festival. In Italy, it was awarded a Special Nastro d’argento “for its poetic realism,” and Frammartino received a nomination for the David di Donatello for Best Director. In 2013, exploring further the tree ritual documented in the latter part of the film, Frammartino created the short film and interactive multimedia installation Alberi (2013). Characterized as “mesmerizing,” it was premiered at the MoMA PS1 before touring major art venues in Europe. While preparing his next project, Frammartino has continued to teach cinematography at the Brera Art Academy and Video Art at the IULM University in Milan, frequently also conducting occasional international workshops for aspiring documentary filmmakers. FRANCHI, FRANCO (1928–1992). Actor. An amateur singer and performer at country fairs, Franco Franchi, born Francesco Benenato, met comic actor Ciccio Ingrassia in 1957 and thereby initiated the most successful comic partnership in Italy of the 1960s. The duo originally staged revues and musical theater but soon graduated to television and film, through which they gained enormous popularity. Beginning with minor appearances in Mario Mattoli’s Appuntamento ad Ischia (Rendezvous at Ischia, 1960) and Vittorio De Sica’s Il giudizio universale (The Last Judgement, 1961), Franchi and Ingrassia went on to star in more than 120 films of varying quality, mostly knockabout farces and often hastily concocted parodies of other well-known and successful films. Although hugely popular with audiences, the duo was generally maligned by the critics, who often found the humor of the films too lowbrow. Franchi’s talents emerged more clearly, however, in films such as “Che cosa sono le nuvole?” (What Are the Clouds?), the episode directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini for the compilation film Capriccio all’Italiana (Caprice

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Italian Style, 1968), and in his role as the Cat to Ingrassia’s Fox in Luigi Comencini’s much-loved television adaptation (and film) Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1972). From the late 1970s, while not abandoning the cinema altogether, Franchi appeared mostly on television, although he returned to the big screen in the mid-1980s to give what is probably his most memorable performance in the role of Zi’ Dima, the jarmender, in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Kaos (Chaos, 1984). FRANCISCI, PIETRO (1906–1977). Screenwriter and director. Although a lawyer by training, Francisci embarked on a career in the cinema in the mid1930s with Rapsodia in Roma (Rhapsody in Rome, 1934), the first of many quality documentaries that he would make on commission for the Istituto LUCE. In the postwar period, he chose to devote himself to fiction, beginning with the musical melodrama Io ti ho incontrato a Napoli (I Met You in Naples, 1946). There followed Natale al campo 119 (Christmas at Camp 119, 1947), a sentimental musical comedy set in a prisoner-of-war camp in California where Italians, waiting to be repatriated after the war, reminisce about life at home. After a fictional biography of Saint Anthony of Padua (Antonio di Padova, 1949), he began to specialize in historical adventure fantasies such as Il leone di Amalfi (The Lion of Amalfi, 1950) and Orlando e i paladini di Francia (Roland the Mighty, 1956). Then in 1958, he made Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules), the film with which he is generally credited with initiating the peplum genre and launching the international film career of American bodybuilder Steve Reeves. The film was hugely successful, both in Italy and abroad. After making what are regarded by aficionados as several other classics of the genre, such as Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1959) and Ercole sfida Sansone (Hercules, Samson and Ulysses, 1963)—and with the genre itself now definitely on the wane— Francisci tried his hand at science fiction with the oddly titled and lowbudgeted 2+5: Missione Hydra (Star Pilot, 1966), which, however, failed to stir much interest or acclaim. His only subsequent film was the adventure Simbad e il califfo di Bagdad (Sinbad and the Caliph of Bagdad, 1973). FREDA, RICCARDO (1909–1999). Screenwriter and director. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Neapolitan parents, Freda grew up watching films with his mother, an avid filmgoer. Having moved back to Italy with the family, he attended school in Milan and nurtured aspirations of becoming a sculptor. He nevertheless joined the film industry in 1937, working originally as a screenwriter on a handful of films directed by Gennaro Righelli. He made his directorial debut with Don Cesare di Bazan (1942), a swashbuckling costume drama set in 17th-century Spain, cowritten with Sergio Amidei and Cesare Zavattini and starring Gino Cervi.

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In the immediate postwar period, Freda began to specialize in the adventure genre, beginning with Aquila nera (Return of the Black Eagle, 1946), an exotic costume drama set in czarist Russia, which topped the box office that year, and then I miserabili (1948), an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel Les misérables, which was released in two parts: Caccia all’uomo (Man Hunt, 1948) and Tempesta su Parigi (Storm over Paris, 1948). These were followed by Il cavaliere misterioso (The Mysterious Rider, 1948), a Casanova adventure thriller that starred Vittorio Gassman in one of his first lead roles, and Il conte Ugolino (Count Ugolino, 1949), a gothic rendering of one of the most infamous episodes from Dante’s Inferno. In the 1950s, Freda made a number of low-budget historical epics before laying down what is regarded as the cornerstone of the revival of the Italian horror genre with I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire, 1957), made under the pseudonym Robert Hampton with cinematography and special effects by Mario Bava. He subsequently worked with some success in most of the other popular genres, from more sword-and-sandal films such as Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan (Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World, 1961) and Maciste all’inferno (The Witch’s Curse, 1962, as Robert Hampton), to Westerns such as La morte non conta i dollari (Death at Owell Rock, 1967, credited as George Lincoln). However, he achieved his greatest renown internationally for his stylish exercises in gothic horror, such as L’orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, 1962) and Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea (Tragic Ceremony, 1972), both made under the pseudonym of Robert Hampton. In the early 1980s, he made a final horror thriller, L’ossessione che uccide (Murder Syndrome, 1981), before retiring from filmmaking altogether. He returned briefly to the industry in the early 1990s to direct the French production La fille de d’Artagnan (Revenge of the Musketeers, 1994); however, the film was eventually finished by Bernand Tavernier, and Freda was only credited with the “idea.” FREDDI, LUIGI (1895–1977). Journalist, producer, and administrator. Much maligned in the postwar period due to his close association with Fascism, Freddi served as the director of the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia (General Directorate of Cinematography) from its inception in 1934 until 1939, when he relinquished this all-important position in favor of becoming the head of both Cinecittà, which he had been instrumental in creating, and the revived Cines studios. After the fall of Fascism in 1943, Freddi pledged his allegiance to the Republic of Salò and consequently moved to Venice, where he was part of the ill-fated attempt to establish a new center for film production, in lieu of the bomb-damaged and now-unusable Cinecittà studios in Rome. In the last days of the war, while attempting to reach Switzerland, he was captured by Resistance fighters and imprisoned.

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He was eventually put on trial in May 1946 on charges of having unlawfully profited from his official position under the Fascist regime, but he was promptly acquitted and released. Given his past history and political association, he was unable ever to work again in the film industry, except for a brief collaboration in 1954 with producer Angelo Rizzoli. Before fading into obscurity, he wrote and published Il cinema, a two-volume memoir detailing his involvement with the Italian film industry. Although long neglected, the book contains such a wealth of information about the Italian cinema during the Fascist period that it was subsequently reissued in an abridged form by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia under the title of Il cinema: Il governo dell’immagine (Cinema: The Management of the Image, 1994). More recently, his contribution to the Italian film industry has been recognized further in the documentary produced by Istituto LUCE-Cinecittà and directed by Vanni Gandolfo, L’arma più forte—l’uomo che inventò Cinecittà (The Strongest Weapon—the Man Who Invented Cinecittà, 2016). FREGOLI, LEOPOLDO (1867–1936). Illusionist, quick-change artist, comic actor, singer, and director. A remarkably gifted mime and impersonator who had already achieved international fame for his ability to change in and out of myriad characters, Fregoli was also one of the first to grasp the potential of the Lumière cinématographe for the purposes of theatrical spectacle. After visiting the Lumière brothers at Lyon in 1896 to learn how to work the apparatus, he returned to Italy with a modified version of their machine, which he dubbed the Fregoligraph. With the help of Luca Comerio, another pioneer of Italian cinema, he used the device to shoot footage, often of his own performances, and then project these short films as part of his stage act. He experimented with splicing short films together to create longer sequences and with projecting films in reverse in order to create greater amazement in his audiences. He also made several films that unveiled the techniques he used to effect his transformations and projected these too as part of his act. Surprisingly, rather than demystifying the process, this seemed only to increase the audience’s appreciation of his remarkable skill. Fregoli toured extensively throughout Europe and the Americas and continued to appear onstage to great acclaim until 1925. However, he was primarily a stage performer, and his dalliance with film was short lived. By 1905, when the feature film industry was beginning in earnest in Italy, Fregoli had already ceased to include films in any of his performances. FRUSTA, ARRIGO (1875–1965). Poet and scriptwriter. Although a qualified lawyer, Arrigo Frusta, born Augusto Sebastiano Ferraris, had chosen to practice journalism and also earned a reputation as a poet in his native Piedmontese dialect before being recruited in 1908 by Arturo Ambrosio to head

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Ambrosio Film’s scriptwriting department. It was Frustra’s writing talents that were largely responsible for the quality and success of Ambrosio’s films, in particular its legion of literary adaptations. When the famous writer-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, after accepting a sizable advance for six adaptations of his works, failed to deliver any of them, Ambrosio delegated the task to Frusta, who scripted all six in less than two years (the films were all released in 1911–1912). Frusta was also responsible for the spectacularly successful Nozze d’oro, which won first prize for a feature film (and 25,000 lire) at the International Exhibition of Turin in 1911. The film was remarkable for, among other things, narrating its story through the use of flashback. In all, Frustra was responsible for close to 300 films. A keen mountaineer, he also used the talents of cameraman Giovanni Vitrotti to make three feature-length travelogues set in the Italian Alps, and he himself directed several adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, among them La bisbetica domata (The Taming of the Shrew, 1913) and Otello (Othello, 1914). After a short but prolific career, briefly interrupted by the war, Frusta left the film industry in 1921, never to return. However, in the 1950s, in a series of articles in the film journal Bianco e nero, Frusta was happy to recount his experiences and the part he had played in the industry’s earliest days. FULCI, LUCIO (1927–1996). Screenwriter and director. Regarded as one of the foremost directors of Italian horror and honored among aficionados with the title of “the godfather of Italian gore,” Fulci abandoned his career as a cardiologist in order to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He then served an apprenticeship working as screenwriter and assistant director to Steno on such classic comedies as Un giorno in pretura (A Day in Court, 1954) and Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome, 1954) as well as on many of the Totò films, such as Totò e le donne (Totò and the Women, 1952), and Totò a colori (Totò in Color, 1952). He made his solo directorial debut with I ladri (The Thieves, 1959), a crime comedy starring Totò and Giovanna Ralli. He subsequently directed a wide variety of films ranging from teen rock musicals like I ragazzi del juke-box (The Jukebox Kids, 1959) and Urlatori alta sbarra (Howlers of the Dock, 1960), which featured then up-and-coming young Italian pop singers Adriano Celentano and Mina, to hard-edged Spaghetti Westerns like Tempo di massacro (Massacre Time, 1966). He achieved his best box office successes, however, with a dozen exceptionally popular screwball comedies featuring the popular comic duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. His move to the darker side began in 1969 with Una sull’altra (One on Top of the Other), a thriller set in San Francisco with distinct similarities to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). This was soon followed by Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1971) and the more famous Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972), a dark

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giallo revolving around a series of gruesome child murders in a backward region of southern Italy. For a period, he continued to alternate between genres, but from the late 1970s, Fulci devoted himself almost exclusively to horror, producing the many zombie and slasher films that would earn him worldwide notoriety, among them Zombi 2 (Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979), Paura nella città dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead, 1980), Lo squartatore di New York (The New York Ripper, 1982), and Zombi 3 (Zombie Flesh Eaters 2, 1988). Having played cameos in quite a number of his films, Fulci rather appropriately chose to appear in his final film for the big screen, Un gatto nel cervello (A Cat in the Brain, 1990), as a horror director haunted by the deaths he has staged in his films and stalked by a psychotic serial killer intent on reproducing them.

G GAGLIANONE, DANIELE (1966–). Screenwriter and director. A very distinctive voice in what came to be called the New Italian Cinema of the 1990s, Gaglianone began working at the Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza (National Film Archive of the Resistance) in 1991, where he produced a number of documentaries on historical topics. At the same time, he began making videos and award-winning short films, often addressing social problems in a very personal key. After collaborating as cowriter and assistant director on Gianni Amelio’s Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998), he directed his first feature, I nostri anni (The Years of Our Lives, 2000), a powerful exploration of the Resistance and its long personal legacy for the people who lived through it. The film received loud acclaim at Cannes in 2001 and, in Italy, was nominated for the Nastro d’argento. After several more interesting documentaries, including Storie di calcio: Le domeniche del Signor Mantaut (Football Stories: Mr. Mantaut’s Sundays, 2003), the portrait of an elderly blind man who insists on going to “watch” his favorite soccer team play every Sunday, Gaglianone directed his similarly much-acclaimed second feature, Nemmeno il destino (Changing Destiny, 2004), a harsh but moving coming-of-age narrative, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Gianfranco Bettin. He returned to documentary with Rata nece biti!—non ci sarà la guerra (There Won’t Be a War, 2008), an attempt to gauge the horrifying heritage left behind by the war in Bosnia, which was awarded the David di Donatello for Best Feature Documentary, before directing Pietro (2010), using a low-budget documentary style to recount the plight and the harsh daily abuse suffered by a mentally handicapped young man at the hands of his hopelessly drug-addicted brother until the point of a violent retaliation. A year later, Ruggine (Rust, 2011), an adaptation of a novel by Stefano Massaron, examined the lingering effect on three adults who had been subjected to pedophilia in preadolescence. He subsequently again embraced the documentary form with Qui (Here, 2014), an attempt to give voice to members of the No Tav movement in Val di Susa, which continued to oppose the construction of a high-speed train line through the presently idyllic valley, and Granma (2017), a short filmed in Nigeria 213

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and made as part of the Aware Migrants Project. More recently, Dove bisogna stare (Where One Must Be, 2019) is a portrait of four very different women united by their devotion to helping foreign immigrants resolve their major problems. GALLONE, CARMINE (1886–1973). Playwright, director, screenwriter, and producer. Frequently remembered, unfairly, merely as the author of that great flop of Fascist cinema, Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal, 1937), Gallone was a prolific and widely acclaimed director responsible for more than 100 films in a career that went from the silent era to the early 1960s. Having already achieved considerable success as an actor and a playwright, Gallone joined the Cines in 1913, bringing with him his wife, Stanislawa Winaver, who, as Soava Gallone, would become a celebrated actress and one of the major divas. A year later, he made his directorial debut with La donna nuda (The Naked Truth, 1914), initiating an artistic partnership with the already-famous diva Lyda Borelli, whom he would subsequently also direct in Marcia nuziale (The Wedding March, 1915), Fior di male (Flower of Evil, 1915), La falena (The Moth, 1916), and Malombra (1917). In the following years, he worked extensively with novelist, scriptwriter, and director Lucio D’Ambra to produce a host of sophisticated comedies and elegant melodramas. He widened his scope to the historical film in 1925 with La cavalcata ardente (The Fiery Cavalcade), a romantic costume drama set against the backdrop of the Risorgimento, and a year later with a remake of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii). In the severe crisis afflicting the Italian film industry during that time, Gallone, like many others, left to work abroad, directing films in Germany, Austria, England, and especially France, where he was influenced by René Clair and made several films scripted by Henri-Georges Clouzot. He returned to Italy in 1936 to direct one of the few films directly financed and sponsored by the Fascist regime and, although Scipione l’Africano was officially feted at Venice with the Mussolini Prize, it has come to be generally regarded as an artistic low point in his career. Subsequently Gallone concentrated on what was undoubtedly his most congenial interest—namely, music—and followed a direction he had already begun to explore in 1935 with Casta diva, a romanticized biography of composer Vincenzo Bellini. In the following years, Gallone would pursue his musical interests through fictional biographies of great composers like Verdi (The Life of Giuseppe Verdi, 1938), Mozart (Melodie eterne [Eternal Melodies], 1940), and Puccini (1953), as well as films of canonical operas such as Manon Lescaut (1940), Rigoletto (1947), Il trovatore (1949), and Madama Butterfly (1954). Quite interesting experiments in the postwar period were Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma

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(Before Him All Rome Trembled, 1949), which married Tosca and the Resistance movement, and Carmen in Trastevere (1962), which set the story of the opera in contemporary times in one of the poorer quarters of Rome. Gallone was lured back briefly to the Roman epic with Cartagine in fiamme (Carthage in Flames, 1960), which became his contribution to the flowering of the peplum at that time. Before retiring he also directed two of the popular Don Camillo films, Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (Don Camillo’s Last Round, 1955) and Don Camillo monsignore . . . ma non troppo (Don Cammillo: Monsignor, 1961). GARRONE, MATTEO (1968–). Director, screenwriter, cameraman, editor, and painter. One of the most impressive young directors to emerge in the late 1990s, Garrone studied art and began painting before working for several years as an assistant camera operator. His first short film, Silhouette (1995), a semifictional presentation of the lives of Nigerian prostitutes plying their trade along the rural highways of southern Italy, won first prize at the 1996 Sacher Festival. Silhouette formed the basis for the opening episode of his first feature, Terra di mezzo (Land in Between, 1997), a film that forcefully highlighted the hinterland experience of illegal migrants in Italy and was awarded the Jury Special Prize at the Turin International Festival of Young Cinema. Garrone’s next film, Ospiti (Guests, 1998), the tragicomic portrayal of two young Albanian immigrants who come to live as “guests” in one of the wealthier parts of Rome, won the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub) award and special mention at the Venice Festival. After Estate romana (Roman Summer, 2000), another tragicomic portrait of existential dislocation in modern-day Rome, Garrone made L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002), a slightly surreal and macabre black comedy that was well received in Italy and abroad; the film was nominated for nine David di Donatello awards and eventually won Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor. There followed Primo amore (First Love, 2004), the story of a goldsmith’s obsessive attempt to reduce the body of the woman he loves to his ideal dimensions, before the film that for many represents his greatest achievement to date, Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008), a powerful adaptation of Roberto Savianio’s best-selling exposé of the Neapolitan Mafia, the camorra. The film was awarded the Grand Prize at Cannes and, in Italy, won seven David di Donatello awards, including for Best Film and Best Director, as well as a Special Nastro d’argento. Its extensive worldwide distribution and box office success brought Garrone an international reputation, and in Italy, the film’s popularity spawned Gomorra—la serie, a groundbreaking long-form television series currently in its fifth season. Four years later, he wrote and directed Reality (2012), ostensibly a film about reality TV but effectively a tragicomic portrait of an entire Italian society floundering in the sea of celebrity culture. In 2015 with Tale of Tales

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(Il racconto dei racconti, 2015), Garrone made his English-language debut and a first foray into pure fantasy. The stunning adaptation of three stories from a collection of fairy tales by the 17th-century Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, Tales was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes, and in Italy, it won eight David di Donatello and three Nastro d’argento awards. More recently he returned to gritty realism with Dogman (2018), a disturbing narrative of urban degradation and violent revenge, which saw its nonprofessional lead actor win the Best Actor Award at Cannes and the film score nine Davids and eight Silver Ribbons. Nothing if not daring, Garrone is close to releasing a new version of Pinocchio starring Roberto Benigni as Geppetto.

Scene from Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008). Courtesy of Photofest.

GASSMAN, ALESSANDRO (1965–). Stage and screen actor and director. Son of legendary actor Vittorio Gassman and French actress Juliette Mayneil, Alessandro Gassman had, by his own account, originally hoped to avoid following in his parents’ footsteps by choosing to study agronomy at university. He eventually capitulated to his father’s insistent wishes and, at the age of 17, consented to appear in Di padre in figlio (From Father to Son, 1982), an autobiographical film written and directed by his father and screened at the Venice Festival. A year later, he was enrolled in acting classes at La Bottega Teatrale in Florence and, by 1984, was appearing onstage with his father in a production of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s verse tragedy Affabulazione.

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Soon, having overcome his earlier reluctance and actively embracing the idea of acting as a career, he began to alternate between working onstage, in film, and on television. In 1987, he played the hot-blooded young nobleman in the historical costume drama La monaca di Monza (The Devils of Monza, 1987) while also appearing as the adult Jesus in the made-for-television Un bambino di nome Gesù (A Child Named Jesus). A year later, he was the son again in L’altro enigma (The Other Enigma), a television adaptation of Pasolini’s Affabulazione, while also appearing onstage in a minor role in Luca Ronconi’s production of Georges Bernanos’s I dialoghi delle Carmelitane (Dialogue of the Carmelite Nuns). In 1990, he played Federico, one of the two male leads in a production of Pino Quartullo’s popular stage comedy Quando eravamo repressi (When We Were Repressed), and he reprised the role in Quartullo’s own film adaptation of the play two years later. By that time, he was also acting in the role of Ismael in a stage adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a part he similarly reprised when the play was itself adapted for television in 1993 as Ulisse e la balena bianca (Ulysses and the White Whale). He subsequently appeared as the composer Gaetano Donizetti in the RAI fourpart series La famiglia Ricordi (The Ricordi Family, 1995) and in Angelo Longoni’s made-for-television romantic comedy Uomini senza donne (Men without Women, 1996) before his acting talents really came to the fore in Ferzan Ozpetek’s debut feature, Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997). Thanks to the success of Hamam, Gassman began to gain an international reputation. In 1999, he was called to play a Calabrian hit man sent to Paris in Philomène Esposito’s Toni (1999) and a make-believe mafioso in Giulio Base’s La bomba (The Bomb, 1999), which hosted one of his father’s last appearances on the big screen, before returning to the stage to play Joe/ Josephine in Saverio Marconi’s widely toured Italian production of Some Like It Hot (A qualcuno piace caldo, 2000–2001). He subsequently continued to appear prolifically on television, in, among others, Piccolo mondo antico (Tides of Change, 2001), directed by Cinzia Th. Torrini for the RAI; the TV epic Crociati (The Crusaders, 2001); and the 12-episode series for Canale 5 titled Le stagioni del cuore (The Seasons of the Heart, 2004). In 2005, he was called to America to play the Italian crime boss and villain Gianni Chellini in the Luc Besson–inspired FrenchAmerican action film Transporter 2 (2005). Returning to Italy, he played the fire chief, Pietro Vega, in the 12-episode Canale 5 series Codice rosso (Code Red, 2006) before making his stage directorial debut producing, directing, and acting in an Italian version of Thomas Bernhard’s The Force of Habit (La forza dell’abitutudine, 2007), an interpretation that saw him awarded the Golden Graal. In the same year, he was appointed artistic director of the Teatro Stabile of Aquila, where he mounted a production of La parola ai giurati, an Italian adaptation of Reginald Rose’s American classic 12 Angry

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Men. In the following year, he returned to the big screen to play Carlo, the brother of Pietro (Nanni Moretti) in Antonello Grimaldi’s multiple-awardwinning Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos, 2008), a performance that brought him the David di Donatello, a Golden Globe, and a Golden Ciak for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently toured La parola ai giurati through northern Italy before returning to the big screen in Pappi Corsicato’s Il seme della discordia (The Seed of Discord, 2008) and Ricky Tognazzi’s Il padre e lo straniero (The Father and the Foreigner, 2010). In 2010, he took up the artistic directorship of the Teatro Stabile del Veneto, where he soon staged Roman e il suo cucciolo, an adaptation of Reinaldo Povod’s much-acclaimed play Cuba and His Teddy Bear, with Gassman himself in the lead role, which had been taken by Robert De Niro when the play had premiered on Broadway. Two years later, he made his entry into feature film direction by adapting Povod’s play as the basis for Razzabastarda (The Mongrel, 2012). The film, with Gassman convincingly playing the part of a hard-edged Romanian drug pusher devoted above all to ensuring a better future for his son, brought him both David and Nastro d’argento nominations for Best Emerging Director and the Golden Globe for Best Actor. He subsequently appeared as one of the two brothers attempting to come to terms with what their children have done in Ivano De Matteo’s I nostri ragazzi (The Dinner, 2014), as the father-to-be ventilating an outrageous name in Francesca Archibugi’s Il nome del figlio (An Italian Name, 2015), and as the charismatic priest, Don Pietro, in Edoardo Falcone’s Se Dio vuole (God Willing, 2015). At the same time, he returned to the stage to direct a highly acclaimed theatrical adaptation of Ken Kesey’s well-known novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which toured the country to sold-out houses for more than two years. In 2017, he cowrote and directed his second feature film, Il premio (The Prize, 2017), a road movie in which a famous writer, terrified of flying, is forced to make his way to collect his Nobel Prize in Stockholm by car, accompanied by his faithful male personal assistant and his two adult but wayward children. After playing the fraudulent screenwriter in Roberto Andò’s La storia senza nome (The Stolen Caravaggio, 2018) and while continuing to star in the RAI police drama series I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Gassman once again returned to the stage to direct Fronte del porto, an adaptation of Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront, previously filmed by Elia Kazan. His most recent appearance on the big screen has been in Simone Godano’s Croce e delizia (An Almost Ordinary Summer, 2019), a warmhearted dramedy in which two mature-aged patriarchs struggle to communicate to their respective families their firm intention to marry each other. GASSMAN, VITTORIO (1922–2000). Actor. Celebrated as Italy’s greatest stage and screen actor of the postwar period, Gassman was born in Genoa but grew up in Rome. As a teenager, he showed great promise as a basketball

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player, but eventually the lure of the stage won out and he enrolled to receive classical training in acting at the National Academy of Dramatic Art. His talent was soon recognized, and even before formally graduating from the academy, he was called to work with the prestigious company of Alda Borelli in Milan. By 1944, he had formed his own touring company, and by 1946, he was not only appearing onstage but had also, in collaboration with Luciano Salce, published a handbook on acting, titled L’educazione teatrale (Training for the Theater). Following a successful tour of Paris and London, in 1948 he was called to work onstage with director Luchino Visconti and won high praise, particularly for his interpretation of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streecar Named Desire and as Troilus in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. After three years as principal actor for the National Theater, in 1952 he joined with director Luigi Squarzina to found the Teatro d’Arte Italiano (Italian Art Theater), in which he performed many of the classics to great acclaim. By this time, he had, almost naturally, also begun to appear in films, his first role being that of Svabrin in Mario Camerini’s adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel La figlia del capitano (The Captain’s Daughter, 1947). There followed another romantic lead in Mario Soldati’s Daniele Cortis (1947), but, especially in the wake of his splendid performance as the evil Walter in Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), he came to be frequently cast as the melodramatic villain, as in Alberto Lattuada’s Anna (1951) or Luigi Comencini’s La tratta delle bianche (The White Slave Trade, 1952). Following his marriage in 1952 to the American actress Shelley Winters, he began working in a number of American films, including Maxwell Shane’s The Glass Wall (1952), in which he played an illegal immigrant to the United States who eventually commits suicide from desperation, and Joseph H. Lewis’s Cry of the Hunted (1952), in which he is an escaped convict on the run. Overall, however, and despite appearing with American actresses of the caliber of Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, Gassman’s career in Hollywood remained a relatively modest affair. Back in Italy (and having divorced Winters), he was slightly more successful directing his first film, Kean: Genio e sregolatezza (Kean: Genius or Scoundrel, 1957), in which he himself played the role of the famous 19thcentury British Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean. The real break in his film career, however, came with his appearance as the stuttering ex-boxer, Peppe, in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), a role that finally revealed his extraordinary propensity for comedy and was recognized with the award of his first Nastro d’argento. The critical and box office triumph of I soliti ignoti was then repeated in Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), in which Gassman’s performance as the reluctant infantryman Giovanni Busacca brought him his first David di Donatello. With the fundamental parameters of his comic persona firmly estab-

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lished, there followed a host of films in which he played variations on a basic characterization, a superficial braggadocio and a loud can-do-anything attitude masking a more basic wiliness and feeling of insecurity. It was thus as something of a personification of an Italy nervously riding the wave of the so-called economic miracle that Gassman came to appear in so many of the key films of the commedia all’italiana, from Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) and I mostri (1963) to Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974). Perhaps his most nuanced performance of this characterization, the retired and blind military officer in Risi’s Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974), earned him not only another Nastro and a David but also the prize for Best Actor at Cannes. The film’s widespread international success also prompted a number of further appearances in American films in the late 1970s, the most notable being in Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1978).

Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi in Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959). Courtesy of Photofest.

Although he continued to alternate between stage and screen, as he had done throughout his career, Gassman reduced his involvement in films during the 1980s while still providing many memorable performances, the most outstanding being in the role of the patriarch in Scola’s La famiglia (The Family, 1987), for which he was awarded the sixth David of his career, and as the zany but lovable uncle in Franco Brusati’s La zio indegno (The

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Sleazy Uncle, 1989). Having collected a host of honors and prizes throughout his career, in 1993 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Urbino for his contribution to Italian culture. In 1996, he received a Career David and a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival for his extraordinary lifetime achievement. Gassman’s final appearance on the big screen was as the old Mafia boss, Don Vito Bracalone, in Giulio Base’s metacinematic comedy La bomba (The Bomb, 1999). GEMMA, GIULIANO (1938–2013). Actor. Having survived a close encounter with an unexploded bomb as a child and then been a keen sportsman in his teenage years, Gemma began his career in films working as a stuntman at Cinecittà. Following a number of tiny roles, including a momentary (and uncredited) appearance in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), he scored a major role in Duccio Tessari’s low-budget peplum Arrivano i Titani (My Son, the Hero, 1962). More prestigious was his albeit brief appearance as Garibaldi’s General in Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), following which he appeared in several more sword-and-sandal epics and the adventure saga Erik il vikingo (Vengeance of the Vikings, 1965) before launching into a host of Spaghetti Westerns, at times (under the pseudonym of Montgomery Wood) taking on the role of the invincible Ringo. He thereafter alternated between paper-thin characters of popular Bgrade films, such as Pasquale Festa Campanile’s prehistoric sex comedy Quando le donne avevano la coda (When Women Had Tails, 1970) and the gangster spoof Anche gli angeli mangiano fagioli (Even Angels Eat Beans, 1973), and taking on more demanding roles in auteur films, such as that of the heroic Resistance fighter Silvio Corbari in Valentino Orsini’s Corbari (1970) or of Major Mattis in Valerio Zurlini’s adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars, 1976), a finely nuanced interpretation that earned him a David di Donatello. A year later, he provided a similarly convincing personification of Cesare Mori, the police commissioner sent to Sicily by Benito Mussolini to clean up the Mafia, in Pasquale Squitieri’s Il prefetto di ferro (The Iron Prefect, 1977). After appearing as the detective Germani in Dario Argento’s horror classic Tenebre (Tenebrae, 1982) and as the much-loved Western comic book hero Tex in Duccio Tessari’s Tex Willer e il signore degli abissi (Tex and the Lord of the Deep, 1985), Gemma gravitated more toward playing supporting roles in television miniseries. This permitted him to indulge more in what had always been another of his passionate interests, sculpture. After appearing as Judge Concato in the two-episode crime drama La bambina dalle mani sporche (The Little Girl with Dirty Hands, 2005), directed by Renzo Martinelli, he went on to play the major role of Colonel Fioravanti in

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the long-running TV series Il capitano (The Captain, 2005–2007). Gemma’s last appearance on the big screen was in a cameo as the Hotel Manager in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012). GENINA, AUGUSTO (1892–1957). Director and screenwriter. A prolific director whose career spanned four decades and almost 100 films, Genina entered the silent film industry in 1912 as a story writer, initially supplying subjects to the Film d’Arte Italiana and the Celio Film company. A year later, he made his directorial debut with an Italian–Spanish coproduction, La moglie di Sua Eccellenza (His Excellency’s Wife, 1913), filmed on location in Barcelona. During the next decade, Genina worked for most of the major Italian studios, writing and directing a host of sophisticated comedies and dark melodramas full of love and betrayal, intrigues and disguises, nobles and paupers, foundlings and femmes fatales. Having thus acquired a reputation for unerring professional competence, he was hired by the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI; Italian Cinematographic Union) in 1919 to head one of their studios in Turin, where he produced, among others, a very effective adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac, which won first prize at the Turin Film Festival in 1923 and much praise in France even before its Italian release. Following the collapse of the UCI and the Italian film industry generally by the mid-1920s, Genina migrated to Germany in 1927, where he made several films with the UFA (Universum Film AG). In 1929, he moved to Paris, where he worked with René Clair, directing the outstanding Prix de beauté (released in Italy in 1930 as Miss Europa), a film starring Louise Brooks and coscripted by Genina and Clair from a story by G. W. Pabst. Although shot silent, the film was dubbed into six languages and released to great acclaim. With the industry slowly beginning to recover in Italy in the early 1930s, Genina returned and, despite lacking any strong personal commitment to Fascism, directed several films that appeared to echo the regime’s militaristic rhetoric and to support its colonialistic aspirations: Lo Squadrone bianco (White Squadron, 1936), L’assedio dell’Alcazar (The Seige of Alcazar, 1940), and Bengasi (1942). Although the considerable aesthetic achievement of these films was always acknowledged—indeed, Alcazar was highly praised by both Luigi Chiarini and Michelangelo Antonioni—their ideological bias counted strongly against Genina in the immediate postwar period. This negative evaluation of the director was redeemed to some extent by his Il cielo sulla palude (Heaven Over the Marshes, 1949), an effective, quasi-Neorealist biography of the modern saint Maria Goretti, a young country girl who had allowed herself to be murdered rather than surrender her virginity. The film received the award for Best Film and Best Director at the Venice Festival in 1949 and the Nastro d’argento for Best Direction in

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1950. Genina’s last film, Frou-Frou, filmed in Paris in 1955, was a wellmade and colorful romantic melodrama not dissimilar in style and spirit to many of the films that he had produced in his early silent period. GERMANO, ELIO (1980–). Stage and screen actor and rap singer. Nurturing a love of acting from his earliest days, Germano made his first appearance on the big screen at the age of 12 as one of the gang of cheeky boys in Castellano and Pipolo’s Ci Hai Rotto Papà! (Dad, We’re Fed Up with You, 1993). While completing his schooling, he also attended acting classes at Rome’s Teatro Azione and was soon involved in performing in amateur theater. In 1999, he was drawn back to film when chosen to play the role of Paolo, the father as a young man during the 1960s, in Carlo Vanzina’s Il cielo in una stanza (The Sky in a Room, 1999). Two years later, having noted his talents, Ettore Scola chose him to play the mild-mannered son in Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, 2001). After appearing in minor roles in Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (2002) and Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005) and, more substantially, as Lucio, the supportive gay factotum of the private detective agency in Gabriele Salvatores’s Quo vadis, baby? (2005), he gave a standout performance as Martino Papucci, the brash young schoolteacher determined to assassinate Napoleon for his betrayal of the ideals of the French Revolution in Paolo Virzì’s N (Io e Napoleone) (Napoleon and Me, 2006). Having established a solid reputation playing opposite no less than Monica Bellucci and Daniel Auteuill, he took on the demanding role of Accio, the brother attracted to the neofascist cause in Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007), for which he received his first David di Donatello for Best Actor. After playing the mentally ill Quattro Formaggi in Gabriele Salvatores’s Come dio comanda (As God Commands, 2008) and Giorgio, the young student led astray in Daniele Vicari’s Il passato è una terra straniera (The Past Is a Foreign Land, 2009), he provided one of his most powerful performances as Claudio, the conflicted construction worker, and husband and solo father, in Luchetti’s La nostra vita (Our Life, 2010), which at Cannes brought him the Best Actor award, shared with Javier Bardem, and in Italy both the Nastro d’argento and his second David. In a pause from cinema at this point, he returned to the theater in a demanding one-man show, performing Thom Pain (based on nothing), by Pulitzer finalist Will Eno. Ever more productive, in 2012, he played the lead in Faccia d’angelo (Angel Face), Andrea Porporati’s television miniseries produced for Sky Cinema, as well as the journalist caught up in the violent police response to protesters at the G8 meeting in Genoa, re-created in Daniele Vicari’s hardhitting Diaz—Don’t Clean Up That Blood (2012), and a quirky would-be actor confronted with a house full of ghosts in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Magnifica

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Elio Germano and Riccardo Scamarcio, poster for Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007). Courtesy of Photofest.

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Presenza (A Magnificent Haunting, 2012). At the same time, together with composer and musician Teho Teardo, he staged a performance in Italian of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. Two years later, returning to the big screen, he gave one of his most compelling performances as the physically afflicted poet Giacomo Leopardi in Mario Martone’s Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi, 2014), a magisterial effort that earned him the Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Festival, as well as the Golden Ciak and his third David as Best Actor. In the event, it was a performance he managed to outdo, in sheer power if not nuance, embodying the event organizer Sebastiano in Stefano Sollima’s Suburra (2015). At the same time, he supplied the mellifluous voice of Sarchiapone, the young buffalo taken north, in Pietro Marcello’s poetic fable Bella e perduta (Lost and Beautiful, 2015). After playing a young St. Francis in L’ami—François d’Assise et ses frères (Saint Francis and His Brothers, 2016) and creditably personifying the veteran actor Nino Manfredi in the telemovie In Arte Nino (2016), he portrayed the tragic figure of Fabio in Gianni Amelio’s La tenerezza (Tenderness, 2017). He subsequently embraced the task of playing the naif painter Antonio Ligabue in Giorgio Diritti’s Volevo nascondermi (Hidden Away, 2020) and, at the same time, returned once again to the stage with La mia battaglia (My Struggle), a theatrical monologue he penned and performed that, as persuasive as it sounded, emerged in the end as having been drawn, ironically, from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When not working on films or on the stage, Germano performs with a socially progressive rap group who sing songs about unemployment, homelessness, and other marginal conditions. GERMI, PIETRO (1914–1974). Actor, director, and screenwriter. Born into a family of very modest means, Germi held ambitions to become an officer and so enrolled in the Naval Institute in his native Genoa. Within three years, however, he had abandoned his plan in favor of attempting a career in the cinema. In 1937, he moved to Rome to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he proved to be a somewhat disruptive student, but not enough to be prevented from soon working as an assistant to Alessandro Blasetti on Retroscena (Backstage, 1939) and with Amleto Palermi on La peccatrice (The Sinner, 1940). After appearing as an extra in Blasetti’s La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941) and Goffredo Alessandrini’s Nozze di sangue (Blood Wedding, 1941), Germi made his directorial debut in 1945 with Il testimone (The Testimony, released 1946), from a story that he had written himself and was financed by the Catholic production company Orbis. Although superficially identified with Neorealism, it was dark and expressionistic in tone and displayed, above all, the strong influence of American crime films, as did his Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1948) and In nome della legge (In the Name of

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Marcello Mastroianni happily burying Daniela Rocca in Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961). Courtesy of Photofest.

the Law, 1949), which was set in Sicily and explored the influence of the Mafia but was also clearly indebted to the Westerns of John Ford. Germi came closer to the social commitment of Neorealism with Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950) and Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo, 1952), but these were followed by two minor films, made on commission, which Germi himself would later dismiss: La presidentessa (Mademoiselle Gobete, 1952) and Gelosia (Jealousy, 1953).

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There was a return to a more socially committed style of filmmaking with Il ferroviere (Man of Iron, 1956) and L’uomo di paglia (The Seducer—Man of Straw, 1958), in both of which he also played the lead, and he continued to direct himself in Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959), an interesting if not altogether successful attempt to adapt Carlo Emilio Gadda’s complex murder mystery Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana. Germi’s most famous film, however, and the one that brought him to international notice, was Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), which won two Nastri d’argento and two Golden Globes, was nominated for three Oscars, and won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. The film has continued to be regarded by many as one of the high points of the commedia all’italiana and certainly one of Marcello Mastroianni’s finest performances. After another biting satire of Sicilian marriage customs and notions of honor in Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964), which brought him the David di Donatello for direction, Germi turned his satirical sights north to the Veneto region in the three-episode Signori e signore (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, 1966), which was poorly received in Italy but was awarded the Palme d’or at Cannes. There followed several other comedies: L’immorale (The Climax, 1967), which was thought by many to be a refracted portrait of Vittorio De Sica and his complicated love life; Serafino (1968); Le castagne sono buone (A Pocketful of Chestnuts, 1970); and Alfredo, Alfredo (1972), universally regarded as one of his least successful films despite the presence of Dustin Hoffman in the leading role. His last film would have been Amici miei (My Friends, 1975), which he had written and was preparing to shoot when he died; the film eventually was directed, to great acclaim, by Mario Monicelli. GHERARDI, PIERO (1909–1971). Art director and production and costume designer. Originally trained as an architect, Gherardi gravitated toward the cinema after World War II, working first as art director on Gianni Franciolini’s Notte di tempesta (Stormy Night, 1947) and then as production designer on Mario Soldati’s Daniele Cortis (1947). Quick to recognize Gherardi’s enormous talents, Mario Monicelli employed him as production designer for a number of his films, including Proibito (Forbidden, 1955), Padri e figli (A Tailor’s Maid, 1955), and Monicelli’s landmark comedy I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958). By this time, Gherardi had also initiated what would be a close and fruitful association with Federico Fellini, designing both the sets and costumes for Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), La dolce vita (1960)—Gherardi was the one responsible for re-creating the entire Via Veneto at Cinecittà—and Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963), his contribution to the last two films earning him the two Oscars of his relatively short career. His production design for Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965) brought him the second Nastro d’argento

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of his career, the first having already been conferred on him for his production design for La dolce vita and the third being awarded for his costume design for Monicelli’s L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966). His most impressive later work was probably the costume design for Mario Bava’s Diabolik (Danger: Diabolik, 1968) and his production and costune design for Luigi Comencini’s television miniseries (subsequently reduced to the film) Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1972). GHIONE, EMILIO (1879–1930). Actor and director. Trained as a miniaturist, Ghione came to the cinema by chance when, unexpectedly, in 1908, he was asked to work as a stuntman and extra for Itala Film in Turin. After also playing supporting roles in several of Itala’s Cretinetti films, he moved to Rome in 1911, where he scored major parts in a number of films with the Cines. In 1913, he transferred to the newly established Celio Film company and appeared in several films directed by Baldassare Negroni, including the landmark film pantomime Historie d’un Pierrot (Pierrot the Prodigal, 1914). By this time, he had already made his directorial debut with Idolo infranto (The Artist’s Model, 1913), which starred the rising diva Francesca Bertini. Ghione’s most famous films, however, were the ones in which he directed himself as Za-la-Mort, a gentleman thief and dark moral avenger, whom he fashioned on the French models of Victorin Jasset and Louis Feuillade. The films used stark, expressionistic lighting to further hollow out the gaunt and cadaverous features of the mysterious protagonist as he pursued his vengeance in a dark and shadowy underworld. Ghione produced a dozen feature films and several series featuring the Zala-Mort character, the most famous being the eight-episode Topi grigi (Gray Mice). The series (and the character) were extremely popular for a time, and Ghione figured as one of the divi of the period, earning fabulously and spending all of it on living the high life. By the 1920s, however, the popularity of Za-la-Mort was fading. Ghione acted in small parts in a number of other films, including Carmine Gallone’s La cavalcata ardente (The Fiery Cavalcade, 1925), but his star was waning. He turned to the theater for a time but with little success. In 1929, he emigrated to Paris, where he lived a destitute existence and eventually fell ill. Repatriated with the financial help of friends, he died in Turin in 1930. GIALLO. Film genre. The Italian use of the term giallo for mystery or detective fiction derives from the distinctive yellow covers of the cheap paperback editions of translations of authors such as Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle, which began to be published in Italy by the Mondadori house in the late 1920s. As applied to films, however, the

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giallo is an extremely wide-ranging and permeable generic category that can include anything from the simple whodunit or police procedural to the psychological thriller and the horror and slasher film. Some historians have seen early antecedents of the modern giallo in a number of murder mystery and crime detection films produced in Italy in the interwar years, films such as Guido Brignone’s Corte d’Assise (1930), Nunzio Malasomma’s L’uomo dall’artiglio (The Man with the Claw, 1931), Mario Camerini’s Giallo (1934), and Gentile Gentilomo’s Cortocircuito (Short Circuit, 1943). In the immediate postwar period, films such as Pietro Germi’s Il testimone (The Testimony, 1947) and Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1958) also appear to foreshadow some of the later developments of the genre. Nevertheless, the giallo proper is usually regarded as beginning with Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963), which laid down the narrative framework that would become one of the staples of the genre—namely, the story of an innocent eyewitness to a violent murder who takes on the role of amateur detective in order to track down the killer and, in the process, becomes one of the killer’s main targets. A year later, Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) also established what would become the genre’s most distinctive visual tropes: the killer’s unmistakable black leather gloves, trench coat, widebrimmed hat, and masked face; the graphic and drawn-out killings staged as spectacular set pieces; the liberal use of knives and other slashing weapons; and a complicit subjective camera that places the spectator in the position of the killer. At first overshadowed by the more flourishing genres of the Spaghetti Western and the horror film, the giallo began to gather real momentum in the late 1960s, emerging in a distinctly erotic version in films such as Umberto Lenzi’s Orgasmo (Paranoia, 1969) and Così dolce così perversa (So Sweet . . . So Perverse, 1970), Romolo Guerrieri’s Il dolce corpo di Deborah (The Sweet Body of Deborah, 1968), and Lucio Fulci’s Una sull’altra (One on Top of the Other, 1969). The form received its greatest boost with Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), which effectively modernized the genre by characterizing the killer’s irrepressible impulse to murder as determined by an earlier, usually childhood, trauma. With his subsequent Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails, 1971) and Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971), Argento confirmed his mastery of the genre, which then exploded frenetically over the next five years in a plethora of slasherfests that included Fulci’s Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1971) and Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972), Sergio Martino’s Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (Blade of the Ripper, 1971), Paolo Cavara’s La tarantola dal ventre nero (Black Belly of the Tarantula, 1971), Aldo Lado’s La corta notte delle bambole di vetro

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(Short Night of the Glass Dolls, 1972), Mario Caiano’s L’occhio nel labirinto (The Eye in the Labyrinth, 1972), Giuliano Carnimeo’s Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?, 1972), and Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (The Death Dealer, 1974). While these films could vary in their (often improbable) stories and settings, they generally worked according to a recognizable formula and tended to employ a limited number of character actors such as George Hilton, Jean Sorel, Luigi Pistilli, Edwige Fenech, Carroll Baker, and Ivan Rassimonov, who thus came to be especially associated with the genre. Although critically dismissed as exploitative and misogynist, many of the films were also graced with effective and memorable musical scores by composers of the caliber of Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani, and Bruno Nicolai. In 1975, Argento took the giallo to new heights with Profondo rosso (Deep Red) before crossing over to the supernatural horror genre with Suspiria (Daria Argento’s Suspiria, 1977). Veteran directors such as Luigi Comencini and Steno also took up the genre during this period, albeit in its more traditional form of the police investigation, and Francesco Rosi provided a political version of the giallo with his Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976). Nevertheless, by the late 1970s the giallo’s fortunes had clearly begun to wane, with many of the directors who had practiced it extensively moving to related genres like the poliziesco and the zombiecannibal movie. At the same time, much of its taste for spectacular gore and violence was taken up by the budding American stalk-and-slasher film. The genre reappeared only sporadically over the next two decades, with Argento returning to it with his own Tenebre (Tenebrae, 1982) and Non ho sonno (Sleepless, 2001) and its sexy version making a reappearance in films such as Carlo Vanzina’s Sotto il vestito niente (Nothing Underneath, 1985) and Lamberto Bava’s Le foto di Gioia (Delirium, 1987). In the new millennium, the continuing popularity of the literary giallo has led critics to see something of a return of the classic giallo in Alex Infascelli’s Almost Blue (2000), adapted from Carlo Lucarelli’s novel of the same name, and Eros Puglielli’s Occhi di cristallo (Eyes of Crystal, 2004) from Luca di Fulvia’s L’impagliatore (The Taxidermist). GIANNINI, GIANCARLO (1942–). Actor, dubber, and director. Born at La Spezia, Giannini grew up in Naples but moved to Rome to study at the National Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his professional theatrical debut in 1963 as Puck in an Italian production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He soon acquired a strong reputation for his performances both onstage and on television, distinguishing himself particularly in the lead role of a much-praised television adaptation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1966). By this time, he was also appearing in films, beginning with the early giallo Libido (1965) and then playing the love interest of

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popular singer Rita Pavone in Lina Wertmüller’s Rita la zanzara (Rita the Mosquito, 1966) and Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito, 1967). After being noticed for his performance in Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia: Tutti i particolari in cronaca (The Pizza Triangle, 1970) and his strong supporting role in Valerio Zurlini’s La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer, 1972), he achieved both national and international renown as the ebullient Mimì in Wertmüller’s Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimi, 1972), which saw him awarded both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento for Best Actor. He subsequently starred, most often paired with the fiery Mariangela Melato, in another half dozen of Wertmüller’s highly charged social farces, earning an Oscar nomination for his performance in Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975). In the following years, Giannini worked with many of the major Italian and international directors, playing the lead in Luchino Visconti’s L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976) and one of the main roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981). His exceptionally fine performance as the Neapolitan scrounger and fix-it man in Nanni Loy’s Mi manda Picone (Picone Sent Me, 1984), brought him his second Nastro d’argento, and he received a third in 1994 for his dubbing of Al Pacino in the Italian version of Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993). He continued to work prolifically throughout the 1990s, often appearing in several films a year. At the beginning of the new millennium, he was awarded his fourth Silver Ribbon for his role as the Italian police inspector in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001). He subsequently appeared in some 50 other films, telefilms, and TV miniseries, internationally most noticed, perhaps, in his role as René Mathis in the James Bond Quantum of Solace (2008). Having once previously in the late 1980s tried his hand at directing, in 2013 he made his second foray and directed himself in the crime thriller Ti ho cercata in tutti i necrologi (The Gambler Who Wouldn’t Die), which, however, elicited only a very tepid critical response. As well as on the big screen, Giannini has more recently also appeared on television, as the patriarch Gian Pietro Liegi in Francesca Archibugi’s six-part series for the RAI, Romanzo familiare (Family Saga, 2018), and in the minor role of Marcello in three episodes of the American series Catch-22 (2019).

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An insouciant Giancarlo Giannini in Lina Wertmüller’s Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975). Courtesy of Photofest.

GIORDANA, MARCO TULLIO (1950–). Director, screenwriter, and novelist. After an intense involvement with left-wing politics during his student years, Giordana worked with Roberto Faenza on the feature-length political documentary Forza Italia (1978). Three years later, he wrote and directed his first fictional feature, Maledetti vi amerò (To Love the Damned, 1980), a bitter reflection on the failure of the 1968 movement to achieve its utopian goals. This was followed by La caduta degli angeli ribelli (The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1981), which recounted an ill-fated liaison between a middleclass wife and mother and a terrorist on the run, and Notti e nebbie (Nights and Fog, 1984), a two-part television adaptation of a wartime novel by Carlo Castellaneta. In the wake of the tragedy at the Heysel soccer stadium in Brussels in 1985, Giordana made Appuntamento a Liverpool (Rendezvous at Liverpool, 1988), a thriller in which a young woman attempts to track down the person responsible for her father’s death. After a period spent directing opera and lyric theater in the early 1990s and also publishing a novel, Vita segreta del signore delle macchine (Secret Life of the Lord of Machines, 1990), Giordana returned to the big screen in 1995 with Pasolini, un delitto italiano (Pasolini, an Italian Crime), a fictional investigation of the many still-unexplained circumstances surrounding the brutal murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

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This was followed by the similarly socially committed I cento passi (The Hundred Steps, 2000), which recounted the life and death of Peppino Impastato, a passionate young left-wing union organizer blown up by the Mafia in Sicily in 1978. The film was widely praised and received a host of prizes, including the Scholars Jury David di Donatello and the Venice Festival Pasinetti Award. Giordana’s greatest triumph, however, came with La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), a moving six-hour family saga spanning three tumultuous decades of recent Italian history. Originally made for RAI television, the film was shown in two parts at Cannes, where it won the Un certain regard section and thereafter achieved spectacular international box office success. This was followed by Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005), a tragic comingof-age drama set within the context of the flow of illegal immigration into Italy. After Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood, 2008), a film paying homage to Luisa Ferida and Osvaldo Valenti, two stars of the Italian screen during the interwar period who were summarily executed by a band of partisans in 1945 on the suspicion of being Fascist collaborators, Giordana returned to an overtly political cinema with Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, 2012), in which he attempted to throw real light on all the dark corners that had insistently remained regarding the fatal bomb that had exploded in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969, killing 17 people and injuring almost 100 and thus initiating a decade of bloody political warfare that came to be known as gli anni di piombo (the years of lead). Three years later, the telefilm Lea (2015) commemorated, without melodramatic sentimentality, the courage of Lea Garofalo, a woman born into the ranks of the Calabrian Mafia but who in 2009 had abandoned her mafioso husband and testified to the authorities in the hope of providing a better life for their daughter, Denise. Although Lea was eventually killed by the husband, the daughter’s willing testimony against her father in court led to his being jailed for life, thus vindicating the mother’s courageous choice. His most recent Nome di donna (A Woman’s Name, 2018) demonstrates a marked affinity with the #MeToo movement by charting in detail the punishing ordeal to which a young single mother comes to be subjected in her determination to denounce and then gain redress for a sexual assault at work. GIROTTI, MARIO (1939–). Actor. Born in Venice to an Italian father and a German mother, Girotti spent his earliest years in war-torn Germany but returned to Italy after the war where he grew up with a keen interest in sports. He was enticed into the film industry at the age of 12 when, during a swimming competition, he was approached by director Dino Risi and persuaded to play a small part in Vazanze col gangster (Vacation with a Gangster, 1952).

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Having already developed a strong love of Latin literature, he would go on to study classics at the University of Rome but, in the meantime, continued to act in films in order to support his studies. He appeared in a number of supporting roles but was soon playing the young male lead in popular romantic melodramas such as Guaglione (1956) and Lazzarella (1957), the latter one of the box office hits of that year. With his reputation growing, he appeared as Count Cavriaghi in Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). There followed a drift toward the European Western, first with parts in a number of the German Westerns adapted from the novels of Karl May—including Winnetou 2: Teil (Winnetou: The Red Gentleman, 1964), directed by Harald Reinl, and Der Ölprinz (The Oil Prince, 1965), directed by Harald Philipp—and then with a much more significant role in the Italian musical Western Little Rita nel West (Crazy Westerners, 1967). This led to playing the role of Cat Stevens in Dio perdona . . . io no (God Forgives . . . I Don’t, 1967), the first film in which he adopted the Anglo-Saxon pseudonym Terence Hill and teamed up with Bud Spencer. As Hill, and with Spencer, he went on to make a long series of knockabout comedies, beginning with the Westerns Lo chiamavano Trinità (My Name Is Trinity, 1970) and Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name, 1971) and then in the more urban settings of Altrimenti ci arrabbiamo (Watch Out! We’re Mad, 1974) and I due superpiedi quasi piatti (Crime Busters, 1977). Having achieved an international reputation with the Trinity films, in the mid-1970s Girotti moved to Hollywood, where he made March or Die (1977) with Gene Hackman and Mr. Billion (1977), directed by Jonathan Kaplan. He returned to Italy, but after directing himself in an updated version of Don Camillo (The World of Don Camillo, 1983), the tragic death of his teenage son in a car accident led him to largely withdraw from the cinema for a number of years. He nevertheless returned and came back to prominence playing the popular priest-detective in the long-running Italian television series Don Matteo (2000–2019). In 2017, while still playing the Don Matteo character in the show’s 11th series, he also directed himself in Il mio nome è Thomas (My Name Is Thomas, 2018), a road movie set in the Almeria region of Spain where so many of the Westerns that had made his early reputation had been filmed. Girotti, as the always better-known Terence Hill, now also has an extremely comprehensive official website: http://it.terencehill.com/index.php. GIROTTI, MASSIMO (1918–2003). Actor. After university studies in engineering, Girotti embarked on a career as an athlete, becoming one of the star swimmers of the Lazio team. By chance, the swimming coach, Fulvio Jacchia, also worked as a scenographer at Cinecittà and so introduced Girotti to Mario Soldati, who gave him a small part in Dora Nelson (1939). Girot-

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ti’s solid physique and good looks soon brought him to the attention of Alessandro Blasetti, who cast him as the good king Licinio and his son, Arminio, in La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), following which Roberto Rossellini gave him the lead in Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942). Then came what would remain Girotti’s defining performance, that of Gino, the handsome young tramp, in Luchino Visconti’s groundbreaking Ossessione (1943). After the war, Girotti took the lead in a number of significant Neorealist films, appearing as Michele, the just-married husband whose wife is kidnapped, in Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and as the determined young magistrate in Pietro Germi’s In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1949), a powerful performance that earned him the Nastro d’argento. A year later, he played Guido in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950) followed by the role of the patriotic marquis, Roberto Ussoni, in Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954). His career then faded somewhat with not much more than appearances in a number of sword-and-sandal epics but was revived when, with his usual acumen, Pier Paolo Pasolini cast him as the father in Teorema (Theorem, 1968) and Bernardo Bertolucci had him play Rosa’s lover, Marcel, in Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972). In the following years, he continued to appear in a number of minor supporting roles, as in Giuliano Montaldo’s L’Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die, 1976) and Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein (Mr. Klein, 1976). He then gave a very creditable performance as the Colonel in Ettore Scola’s Passione d’amore (Passion of Love, 1981) and played the part of the Distinguished Resident in Roberto Benigni’s Il mostro (The Monster, 1994). A decade later, just before passing away, he crowned a career of solid achievement with his very powerful and sensitive portrayal of the elderly amnesiac survivor of the death camps in Ferzan Ozpetek’s La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows, 2003). GOLINO, VALERIA (1966–). Actress, director, and producer. Born in Naples to a Greek mother who was a painter and a Neapolitan father who was a scholar of German literature, Golino grew up, following her parents’ separation, between Athens and Naples. At the age of 11, she was obliged to spend six months in Chicago having an operation to redress her scoliosis, during which she was able to add English to her fluency in Greek and Italian. In her final years of high school, she began to work as a model and to appear in commercials, but a chance encounter with Lina Wertmüller led to her making her debut in films as the flighty daughter of Ugo Tognazzi in Wertmüller’s Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l’angolo come un brigante da strada (Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait around the Corner Like a Brigand, 1983). Her natural acting talents, however, only really came to the

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fore when she played the drug-addicted Francesca in Valentino Orsini’s Figlio mio infinitamente caro (My Dearest Son, 1985) and the maid, Mara, in Peter Del Monte’s Piccoli fuochi (Little Flames, 1985), a role for which she received her first nomination for the Nastro d’argento. A year later, she won both a Nastro and the Best Actress award at the Venice Festival for her compelling performance in Francesco Maselli’s Storia d’amore (A Tale of Love, 1986). Her stunning looks soon had her appearing as the femme fatale in Alexander Arcady’s Dernier été à Tanger (Last Summer in Tangiers, 1987) and as the vivacious younger sister in Margarethe von Trotta’s Paura e amore (Three Sisters, 1988). In 1988, she moved to Los Angeles and initiated what would be a significant presence in Hollywood films, ranging from dramatic roles in Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988), in which she shared top billing with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, and in Sean Penn’s directorial debut, The Indian Runner (1991), to less demanding comic roles, playing opposite Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) in Big Top Pee-wee (1988) or with Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots: Part Deux (1993). At the same time, she continued to maintain a foothold in what was emerging as the New Italian Cinema, appearing in films such as Gabriele Salvatores’s Puerto Escondido (1992) and Giacomo Campiotti’s Come due coccodrilli (Like Two Crocodiles, 1994). From the mid-1990s, she oriented herself more toward Europe, playing the wife in Andreas Pantzis’s I sfagi tou kokora (Slaughter of the Cock, 1996) and then young mothers in Silvio Soldini’s Le acrobate (The Acrobats, 1997) and Francesca Archibugi’s L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon, 1998). In the new millennium, after working again with Andreas Pantzis in To tama (Evagora’s Vow, 2002), she gave one of her most captivating performances as Grazia, the mentally erratic wife and mother, in Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (2002), earning her a fourth David di Donatello nomination and winning her first Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. A similarly outstanding performance as the foster mother in Antonio Capuano’s La guerra di Mario (Mario’s War, 2005) brought her a career-first David as well as the Italian Golden Globe and the Flaiano Prize for Best Actress. Despite demonstrating a certain reticence regarding her talents as a singer, her rendition of the theme song for Giulia non esce la sera (Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night, 2009) won the Nastro for Best Song, while her role as Giulia in the film brought her further nominations for both the David and the Nastro. After appearing in more than 60 films, Golino made her first attempt at writing and directing with Armandino e il MADRE (Armandino and the Museum, 2010), a charming short that managed to recount its love story between two teenagers at the same time as celebrating the Neapolitan Museum of Contemporary Art (MADRE), earning her the Silver Ribbon for Best Emerging Short Film Director. Three years later, she amply confirmed

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her directorial talents by writing and directing her first full feature, Miele (Honey, 2013). The story of a young woman willing to risk jail in her dedication to facilitating access to euthanasia for the terminally ill, Miele premiered in the Un certain regard section at Cannes, where it received the Special Mention prize of the Ecumenical Jury and, in Italy, was feted with seven David di Donatello and six Nastro d’argento nominations, in the event winning the David for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Producer as well as the Nastro for Best Director, Best Actress, Best Sound, and Best Supporting Actor. Golino nevertheless soon returned in front of the camera to give an extraordinarily nuanced performance as an all-loving and all-suffering wife and mother in Giuseppe M. Gaudino’s Per amor vostro (Anna, 2015), an achievement recognized at Venice with both the Volpi Cup and the Pasinetti Award. After also convincingly playing the part of Emma, the blind chiropractor, in Silvio Soldini’s Il colore nascosto delle cose (Emma, 2017) and Tina, the foster mother, in Laura Bispuri’s Figlia mia (Daughter of Mine, 2018), she directed her second feature, Euforia (Euphoria, 2018). Premiered at Cannes out of competition, in Italy it was nominated for seven Davids. In the same year, Golino, as one of the most awarded actresses in contemporary Italian cinema, was also honored with the prestigious Anna Magnani Prize.

Valeria Golino riding with her two sons in Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (2002). Courtesy of Photofest.

GOMORRA—LA SERIE. Long-form television series. In 2013, in the wake of the success of Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008), Matteo Garrone’s prizewinning adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s best-selling exposé of the activities

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of the Neapolitan criminal underworld, the camorra, cable television provider Sky partnered with Italian film producers Cattleya and Fandango to produce a 12-part television series that could exploit some of the material in Saviano’s book that had been left out of Garrone’s film. The spectacular success of the first season, aired in May–June 2014 on Sky Atlantic and Sky Cinema 1, led to the series immediately going through a second (May–June 2016), third (November–December 2017), and fourth season (March–May 2019), with a fifth slated to appear in 2020. The first season—supervised and directed by Stefano Sollima, with Francesca Comencini and Claudio Cupellini also directing several episodes and Roberto Saviano collaborating on the screenplay—narrated the activities, rivalries, and ultimately the fragmentation of the powerful Savasto clan. Given the story and its high production values, the first season attracted an average of more than 700,000 viewers per episode, almost doubling what Sky had been able to achieve as its previous best with Romanzo criminale— la serie, and thus becoming the broadcaster’s most watched series of all time. The obvious popular appeal of the series prompted the producers to follow its airing with a theatrical release of four weeks in some 200 cinemas, an unprecedented event bearing witness to the changes in the traditional relation between television and cinema that had already occurred in America but were only now taking effect in Italy. Created by the same production team but with an increased budget of 16.5 million euros, the second season—with up-and-coming young director Claudio Giovannesi also brought on board to direct two episodes—developed further the internal disintegration of the Savasto clan and the emergence of a new network of alliances, rivalries, and betrayals between the other camorra groups. Airing on Sky Atlantic and Sky Cinema 1 in May–June 2016, it attracted over 60 percent more viewers than the first season. Already solid international sales of the series also skyrocketed with the second season selling into 113 countries. The third season, directed by Francesca Comencini and Claudio Cupellini (but without Sollima, who had left to work on another project), experimented with an unprecedented screening of the first two episodes in some 300 cinemas on the two days preceding its launch on Sky Atlantic in September 2016, a gamble that patently succeeded not only in taking more than 500,000 euros at the box office in two days but in also increasing the audience for its subsequent television launch to well over one million viewers, overtaking, as the producers gleefully pointed out, numbers for the launch of the seventh season of Game of Thrones. The fourth season, beginning to air in March 2019, was supervised and directed by Francesca Comencini and Cupellini, with the surprising addition to the directorial team of Marco d’Amore, the previously unknown but now well-recognized actor who had played the central character of Ciro, better known as “The Immortal,” throughout the series but had been killed off in

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the final moments of season 3. The further addition to the directorial team of Enrico Rosati and Ciro Visco, who had both worked as assistant directors on the series from its inception, confirmed that by this stage the series had become a self-perpetuating universe. Indeed, even as the last episode of season 4 aired on 3 May 2019 it was announced that Marco d’Amore would be both directing and starring in L’immortale (The Immortal), a prequel filling in all the details of Ciro’s life before his appearance in the first scene of season 1 as the young tough explaining how Facebook functions to his older companion as they both prepare to go and firebomb the house of Don Pietro Savasto’s rival boss. Cannily, the prequel was scheduled to appear well before the first episode of season 5 in 2020, thus opening up the possibility that, despite appearances, Ciro may not have died at the end of season 3 after all. Despite its critical and commercial success, or perhaps because of it, the series continued to attract criticism for its apparent endorsement and effective popularization of the camorra itself, a charge that had often been leveled at Roberto Saviano, author of the book and key consultant for the entire series. Saviano and the producers regularly rejected the charge, claiming the series was not endorsing the criminal lifestyle but rather highlighting its dangers. The series’ popularity also inevitably spawned a host of parodies, one of the wittiest being Gli effetti di Gomorra la serie sulla gente (The Effects of Gomorrah the Series on People), a web series produced and distributed online by the Neapolitan video web collective I Jackal, which in an early episode managed to have Salvatore Esposito, the actor playing the fierce young camorra boss, Genny, and Roberto Saviano himself, appear in one of their satirical takes on the series. GRIECO, DAVID (1951–). Actor, journalist, writer, and director. Grandson of Ruggiero Grieco, one of the founders of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), son of Bruno Grieco, journalist, avid cinephile, cofounder of the Porretta Film Festival, and nephew of veteran genre director Sergio Grieco, David Grieco lived and breathed cinema from his earliest years and, in his teens, was co-opted to take on small parts, uncredited, in a number of films by directors like Franco Zeffirelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who were close friends of the family. However, he soon realized that acting was not his calling and, at the age of 19, joined the PCI daily, L’unità, where for many years he served as film and music critic, and, at times, as foreign correspondent. Never having quite abandoned his love of cinema, he was drawn back to the film industry in his early 30s, working as a screenwriter, often with Sergio Citti, for whom he coscripted the popular television miniseries Sogni e bisogni (Dreams and Needs, 1985), Mortacci (1989), and I magi randagi (We Free Kings, 1996), and with maverick director Giulio Questi, with whom he wrote the five-episode television miniseries Quando arriva il giu-

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dice (When the Judge Arrives, 1986), the psychological thriller Non aprite all’uomo nero (Don’t Open the Door to the Black Man, 1990), and the mystery thriller Il segno del commando (The Sign of Power, 1992). A visit to Russia around this time ignited his intense interest in the trial of Andrei Čikatilo, a serial killer who, for more than a dozen years, had terrorized the port city of Rostov, raping, murdering, dismembering, and, in some cases, eating the flesh of more than 50 women and children. After lengthy investigations, Grieco published a novel dealing with the case, titled Il communista che mangiava i bambini (The Communist Who Ate Children, 1994). He was soon able to generate a screenplay from the book but, for a number of years, was unable to find funds or a willing director for the project, and so in 2004, he directed it himself as his first full-length feature, Evilenko (2004). Although not shying away from displaying the crimes in all their horror, Grieco, still an ardent Euro-Communist, attempted to present the rise and fall of Evilenko/Čikatilo as something of an allegory of the failure of the Soviet system. A difficult film to watch—and it seems that often many spectators walked out after only a few minutes—the film brought Grieco a host of prizes at foreign film festivals and, in Italy, a David di Donatello and a Nastro d’argento nomination for Best Emerging Director. He subsequently returned to Russia to make a full-length documentary for the RAI, titled La favola inventata (The Fake Fairy Tale, 2005). After several more documentaries, including Valdagno, Arizona (2011), a record of the fascinated discovery of Native American culture on the part of Italian songwriter Umberto Marzotto, Grieco was approached to work with Italian American director Abel Ferrara on a film about the last days of Pasolini. Grieco’s personal relationship with the murdered director—and his close acquaintance with the interminable investigations into his death that had continued for 40 years—soon led to irreconcilable differences between the two men. As a result, Grieco decided to write and direct his own interpretation of how Pasolini had died in La macchinazione (The Ploy, 2015). In a much more complex interpretation than that given in previous films on Pasolini’s murder, including Marco Tullio Giordana’s Pasolini—un delitto italiano (Pasolini: An Italian Crime, 1995) and Ferrara’s own Pasolini (2014), Grieco’s film suggested that Pasolini had been eliminated in an intricate plot hatched with the complicity of an extended network of criminal and rightwing elements ultimately leading back to the entrepreneur industrialist and suspected creator of the P2 Masonic Lodge, Eugenio Cefis. Pasolini, the film maintains, had discovered the existence of this network and of Cefis’s fundamental role in many of the dark mysteries of Italy’s past and was detailing it in his unfinished and posthumously published novel, Petrolio (Oil). The film drew a mixed critical reception but contributed momentum to a widely supported demand for a parliamentary commission to investigate the new clues

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to the murder that the film presented. Grieco also outlined all the new evidence in the published volume La macchinazione: Pasolini, la verità sulla morte (The Ploy: Pasolini, the Truth about His Death, 2015). In 2017, the National Film Museum awarded Grieco its annual Maria Adriana Prolo Prize for his career in cinema. GRIMALDI, AURELIO (1957–). Novelist, screenwriter, and director. Grimaldi began as a writer in the late 1980s recounting his experience as a teacher in a Palermo juvenile prison. He subsequently adapted one of his novels set in a Sicilian reformatory as the screenplay of Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Forever Mary, 1989), which received the Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes that year. This was followed by Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside, 1990), effectively a sequel to Mery, which followed the lives of the young juveniles once they had been discharged. After scripting Uomo di rispetto (Man of Respect, 1992), one of Damiano Damiani’s films on the Mafia, and providing the subject for Felice Farina’s Ultimo respiro (The Last Breath, 1992), Grimaldi began writing and directing his own films, beginning with La discesa di Acla a Floristella (Acla’s Descent into Floristella, 1992), a story about child labor and exploitation, and La ribelle (The Rebel, 1993), a portrait of Enza, a streetwise but sexually innocent 16-year-old juvenile, convincingly played by a young Penelope Cruz. After Le buttane (The Whores, 1994), another hard-edged portrayal of the life of a group of Sicilian prostitutes, Grimaldi went even further with the provocative Nerolio: Sputerò su mio padre (Blackoil: I Will Spit on My Father), a fictional portrait of the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini (made in 1996 but only released in Italy two years later). There followed Il macellaio (The Butcher, 1998) and La donna lupo (The Man-Eater, 1999) before Grimaldi returned to Pasolini with Un mondo d’amore (A World of Love, 2002), this time focusing on an earlier period of Pasolini’s life. In the same year, still obsessed with Pasolini, as he himself admitted, Grimaldi produced a contemporary Neapolitan remake of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) with his Rosa Funzeca (2002). The erotic-libertine dimension present in the earlier films was made more explicit in Grimaldi’s next film, L’educazione sentimentale di Eugenie (The Sentimental Education of Eugenie, 2005), loosely adapted from a work by the Marquis de Sade. In the following years, while completing Anita (2007), a biopic of the young Brazilian woman who became the militant partner of the Italian Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, Grimaldi continued to work on a project for a trilogy of films on the kidnapping and murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro, which, however, due to numerous production and financial difficulties, was eventually edited into one film, Se sarà luce sarà bellissimo— Moro: Un’altra storia (If It Will Be Light, It Will Be Wonderful—Moro: An other Account), and finally released in 2008. The influence of Pasolini re-

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turned in L’ultimo re (The Last King, 2009), a loose adaptation of Seneca’s Trojan Women. After Figli di chi si amava (Children of Those Who Used to Love Each Other, 2012), a documentary on children who have been through parental separations, Grimaldi returned to Brazil to film O sangue è quente da Bahia (Blood in Bahia’s Hot, 2013). Two years later, he returned to the documentary form in his Alicudi nel vento (2015), an attempt to present living conditions on one of the smaller and more deserted of the Eolian islands, before his most recent feature, La divina Dolzeida (The Divine Dolzeida, 2017), an exuberant and life-affirming comedy about a mature-aged Sicilian sex worker who, among her many talents, has the ability to recite parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy by heart. GUADAGNINO, LUCA (1971–). Producer, director, screenwriter, and critic. Born in Palermo to a Sicilian father and an Algerian mother, Guadagnino spent his early years in Ethiopia before returning to Italy with his family at the age of seven. A passionate cinephile during his teens, he graduated in cinema studies from La Sapienza University in Rome with a thesis on Jonathan Demme. After working as a film reviewer and making a handful of shorts and documentaries in the mid-1990s, he was able to write and direct his first feature, The Protagonists (1999). Both experimental and self-reflexive, and starring Tilda Swinton in the first of what would be numerous collaborations on film projects, the film was ostensibly the record of an Italian director and his crew’s attempt to make a documentary in London about a sensational real-life murder that had taken place in the English capital five years earlier. Although characterized by one critic as disturbing and difficult to watch, The Protagonists was screened at the Venice Festival that year, where it received the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub) Special Mention Award. After making several other compelling documentaries, including Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory (2002), Mundo civilizado (Dream Generation, 2003) and Cuoco contadino (Farmer Chef, 2004), Guadagnino achieved notoriety and a certain amount of commercial success with Melissa P. (2005), his adaptation of Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire (One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed), the controversial best-selling autobiographical novel published two years earlier by Sicilian teenager Melissa Panarello, in which she recounted her sexual initiation in explicit detail. Interference on the part of the producers with the film’s final cut led to Guadagnino subsequently distancing himself from it. A real career breakthrough, however, arrived with Guadagnino’s third feature, Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009). A huge critical and box office success internationally, in Italy the film received only a lukewarm reception. While planning his next feature he returned to making documentaries, among them Inconscio italiano (Italian Unconscious, 2011), an essay-film attempting to explore the darker side of Italy’s national identity in the light of

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its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and Bertolucci on Bertolucci (2013), a fulllength documentary of the director’s life and work that screened at that year’s Venice Festival. At the same time, he also accepted an invitation to direct a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Falstaff at the Teatro Filarmonico of Verona. In 2015, he returned to the big screen with A Bigger Splash, an ebullient remake of Jacques Deray’s La piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969), with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes in the lead roles. Screened in competition at Venice, it received the Best Innovative Budget and the Sountrack Stars awards. Guadagnino’s fifth feature, Chiamami con il tuo nome (Call Me By Your Name, 2017), an adaptation of André Aciman’s novel of the same name, attracted unprecedented acclaim internationally, being nominated for, among others, three Golden Globes and four Academy Awards, and also finally brought him significant recognition in Italy, where the film received 12 David di Donatello and three Nastro d’argento nominations and was put forward as the Italian candidate for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. A year later, Suspiria (2018), a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic, was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice, in the event winning the awards for Best Special Effects and Best Original Song. Continuing to be more highly regarded internationally than in Italy itself, Guadagnino has announced plans for a feature film inspired by Bob Dylan’s 1975 Blood on the Tracks album and, more recently, has been engaged by HBO to direct a six-part television series as a continuation of Call Me By Your Name, following the book, in a way Guadagnino’s original film had not been able to do, into the characters’ next 20 years of life. GUAZZONI, ENRICO (1876–1949). Painter and director. With a degree in fine arts and a background in painting, Guazzoni began his career in films as a scenographer for the Alberini & Santoni company in Rome in 1906. In 1909, he joined the Cines, originally as set designer for Mario Caserini, but he soon became one of the company’s most prolific and high-profile directors. Although he would make films in a wide variety of genres, he became best known for his grand historical epics, especially those set in Roman times, which demonstrated a real flair for the spectacular and consistently created a strong sense of three-dimensional space absent from earlier films of the genre. The moderate acclaim won by Guazzoni’s early Roman films like Agrippina and Brutus, released in 1911, paled in comparison to the overwhelming international success two years later of Quo vadis?, a film that catapulted him to world fame and set the benchmark for epic spectacle from then on. Guazzoni lifted that benchmark himself a year later with the colossal (and colossally budgeted) Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar, 1914), a film that required not only the accurate miniature reconstruction of the entire city of Rome but also the employment of 20,000 extras for the crowd scenes.

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Having set up his own production company in 1918, he continued to produce large-canvas films such as the medieval epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem, 1918), adapted from Torquato Tasso’s famous chivalric poem of the same name, and Il sacco di Roma (The Sack of Rome, 1920), but the company soon collapsed in the general crisis that gripped the Italian film industry in the early 1920s. In 1923, however, again for the Cines, he directed what many regard as his most spectacular film, Messalina, which raised the sword-and-sandal epic to new heights and included a splendid chariot race that would be closely imitated, two years later, in the Hollywood production of Ben-Hur. Nevertheless, the cost of the film helped bankrupt the company, and Guazzoni left the industry for a period. He returned to filmmaking after the introduction of sound, directing a number of lighthearted comedies, the best regarded being Re burlone (The King’s Jester, 1935), and several adaptations of the exotic adventure novels of Emilio Salgari, among them La figlia del corsaro verde (The Daughter of the Green Corsair, 1940) and I pirati della Malesia (Pirates of Malaya, 1941). His last film, made with difficulty at Cinecittà in the last year of the Second World War, was La fornarina (The Baker’s Daughter, 1944).

Gladiators in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? (1913). Courtesy of Photofest.

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GUERRA, TONINO (1920–2012). Poet, painter, novelist, installation artist, and screenwriter. While establishing a strong reputation as a dialect poet and fiction writer in the late 1950s, Tonino Guerra, born Antonio Guerra, also began to write for the cinema, his first collaborations being with Giuseppe De Santis on Uomini e lupi (Men and Wolves, 1957) and La strada lunga un anno (The Year Long Road, 1958). Two years later, with his screenplay for L’avventura (1960), he initiated what would become a lifelong partnership with Michelangelo Antonioni, which would see him writing all of Antonioni’s subsequent films (with the exception of The Passenger [1975]) and sharing an Oscar nomination with the director for the screenplay of Blowup (1966). By the mid-1960s, while continuing to publish poetry and fiction, he had also instituted a similarly long and fruitful partnership with Francesco Rosi, for whom he would write all the major films from C’era una volta (More Than a Miracle, 1967) to La tregua (The Truce, 1997). Only a few years later, his contribution to Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) earned him his second Oscar nomination for screenwriting. During the 1980s, he continued to write for Antonioni and Fellini while also collaborating with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani on several of their most acclaimed films, including La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982), Kaos (Chaos, 1984), and Good morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon, 1987). In 1983, having acquired an international reputation, Guerra was sought out by legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky to help write the screenplay for Nostalghia (1983). Soon after, he also began working with eminent Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos, with whom he would eventually make seven films, beginning with Taxidi sta Kithira (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), for which he received the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, and continuing through to Trilogia: To Livadi pou dakryzei (Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, 2004), which was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin. After receiving a host of prizes and awards during his long career, in 2004 Guerra was also honored with the title of Best European Screenwriter at the first Festival of European Screenwriters at Strasbourg. His last collaboration for the big screen was on the screenplay of Pasquale Scimeca’s Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 2010).

H HILL, TERENCE. See GIROTTI, MARIO (1939–). HORROR FILM. Film genre. With the significant exception of Carmine Gallone’s gothic mystery tale Malombra (1917) and Eugenio Testa’s Il mostro di Frankenstein (Frankenstein’s Monster, 1920), Italian silent cinema appears to have shown little interest in the horror genre. In the early sound years, Alessandro Blasetti made a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, Il caso Haller (The Haller Case, 1933), but it is generally agreed that the horror genre really only began in Italy in the late 1950s with Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire, 1957) and Caltiki, il mostro immortale (Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, 1959), both photographed and codirected by Mario Bava. The genre exploded, however, in 1960 when Mario Bava made his landmark Maschera del Demonio (Black Sunday, 1960), flanked by Giorgio Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Mill of the Stone Women, 1960), Renato Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro (The Vampire and the Ballerina, 1960), Piero Regnoli’s L’ultima preda del vampiro (The Playgirls and the Vampire, 1960), and Anton Giulio Majano’s Seddok, l’erede di Satana (Atom Age Vampire, 1960). The genre continued to flourish throughout the 1960s in films such as Freda’s L’orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock (The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, 1962) and Lo spettro (The Ghost, 1963); Antonio Margheriti’s La danza macabra (The Castle of Terror, 1963), La vergine di Norimberga (Horror Castle, 1963), I lunghi capelli della morte (The Long Hair of Death, 1964), and Contronatura (Unnaturals, 1969); Camillo Mastrocinque’s La cripta e l’incubo (Terror in the Crypt, 1964) and Un angelo per Satana (An Angel for Satan, 1966); and Massimo Pupilla’s Il boia scarlatto (Bloody Pit of Horror, 1965), Cinque tombe per un medium (Terror Creatures from the Grave, 1966), and La vendetta di Lady Morgan (The Vengeance of Lady Morgan, 1966). The borders between the horror film proper and the emerging giallo were not always clear as the same directors often worked in both, and the spectacular aspects of horror also easily migrated to genres like the peplum in films such as Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the 247

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Haunted World, 1961) and Giacomo Gentilomo’s Maciste contro il vampiro (Goliath and the Vampires, 1961), and to science fiction as in Bava’s Terrore nello spazio (Terror in Space, 1965). The genre flourished so much during this period that it also spawned numerous parodies, such as Steno’s Tempi duri per vampiri (Uncle Was a Vampire, 1959) and Un mostro e mezzo (A Monster and a Half, 1964). In the 1970s, the genre dissipated into a number of subgenres such as the zombie and cannibal films of Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi but received new life in the work of Dario Argento, who came to be internationally renowned as the master of Italian horror for classics such as Suspiria (Dario Argento’s Suspiria, 1976) and Inferno (Dario Argento’s Inferno, 1980). A notable contribution to the genre was also made by the more art house director Pupi Avati with his La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows, 1976), Zeder (Revenge of the Dead, 1983), and L’arcano incantatore (The Arcane Enchanter, 1996). Although the genre was critically underappreciated, it attracted collaboration from composers such as Ennio Morricone, Roman Vlad, and Riz Ortolani, screenwriters such as Ennio De Concini and Bernardino Zapponi, and cinematographers like Vittorio Storaro, Luciano Tovoli, and Luigi Kuveiller, all of whom contributed to the spectacular quality of the genre.

I I SOLITI IGNOTI (BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET, 1958). Film. Directed by Mario Monicelli from a screenplay written by Age e Scarpelli and Suso Cecchi D’Amico, I soliti ignoti (literally ‘The Usual Unknowns”) is widely acknowledged as the film that initiated the prolific genre of the commedia all’italiana. A sort of comic version of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and an implicit parody of the American crime film, it recounts the story of a bungled attempt by a motley group of Roman petty thieves to break into a pawnbroker’s shop in Via delle madonne (Madonna Street) to steal the valuables from its safe. The plan calls for the gang first to make their way at night into an empty apartment adjacent to the shop and then to break through its (supposedly) paper-thin wall to reach the room with the safe. Although nothing goes quite according to plan from the very beginning and complications result all along the way, the gang does manage finally to enter the apartment and, after a great deal of comic business, succeeds in breaking through the wall. They discover, however, to their jaw-dropping surprise, that they have chosen the wrong wall; instead of breaking into the pawnshop next door, they have only managed to break through to the apartment’s own kitchen. Resigning themselves to the fact that the plan has misfired, they do the only thing they can do in the situation, which is to settle down at the table and finish off a pot of pasta and chickpeas that the owners have left behind on the stove. The newspaper headlines the next day will read: “The Usual Unknowns: Thieves Knock Down a Wall to Steal a Plate of Pasta and Chickpeas.” With stunning black-and-white photography by master cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, and a boisterous jazz score from Piero Umiliani, the film has become legendary in the annals of Italian cinema, not least for being a revelation of Vittorio Gassman’s previously unsuspected talent for comedy, as well as being the film in which Claudia Cardinale made her screen debut. The film’s comedy is multifaceted and draws on slapstick and farce for its verbal and visual gags and on situation comedy for its characterizations. A strikingly effective use is also made of the silent film technique of intertitles. The greater part of the humor, however, derives from the charac249

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ters themselves and the way in which they are incisively portrayed: Peppe (Gassman), a failed boxer with a stutter who has self-delusions about being “scientific” in his approach; Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni), an unemployed photographer eternally playing mother to his infant child while his wife is in prison for selling contraband cigarettes; Mario (Renato Salvatori), the young thief always concerned about his mother; Ferribotte (Tiberio Murgia), the swarthy Sicilian who keeps his sister under lock and key in order to safeguard her virtue; and, perhaps the funniest and most unlikely of them all, Capanelle (Carlo Pisacane), a toothless old codger with a squeaky voice always ready to pounce on any food in the vicinity. The inclusion of Totò as Dante Cruciani, the retired master safecracker who lectures the boys on the finer points of the art, is an inspired touch, playing a crucial role in the film itself but also paying homage to the comedian’s brilliant performance as a poor thief in Monicelli’s own earlier Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951). The film’s extraordinary box office success prompted two sequels and a number of imitations. In Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco in Milan, 1959), directed a year later by Nanni Loy, the same gang of incompetents (minus Mastroianni’s Tiberio but with the addition of Nino Manfredi) is drawn into a plan to rob the proceeds of a soccer match at the Milan stadium. Against all odds and despite all sorts of complications, they finally succeed in getting their hands on the money but are forced in the end to abandon it all in a public park. I soliti ignoti vent’anni dopo (Big Deal after 20 Years, 1985), directed by Amanzio Todini, brings back Mastroianni’s Tiberio (but with only Ferribotte and Peppe from the old gang) in a plan that appears to involve smuggling currency across the Italian border for a syndicate of Yugoslav gangsters. In the end, Tiberio and his gang discover that they have been used as drug couriers. While Loy’s more immediate sequel was judged almost as good as the original, Todini’s film was generally dismissed as a much paler imitation, hopefully prompting its viewers to search out the original. INCROCCI, AGENORE (1919–2005). Screenwriter. For almost four decades, and always known simply as “Age,” Incrocci teamed up with Furio Scarpelli to form one of the most productive screenwriting duos in Italian postwar cinema. Their prolific partnership began in the immediate postwar period when they both collaborated on the script of Mario Monicelli’s Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949), which became the first of more than a dozen films they would help pen for the great comic actor Totò. After having worked together on more than 30 films ranging from romantic comedies to action adventures, in 1958 they gave birth to the so-called commedia all’italiana with the story and screenplay of Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), for which they shared their first Nastro

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d’argento. They subsequently wrote many of the great classics of the genre including La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), I mostri (15 from Rome, 1963), and C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974). In 1965, they received an Oscar nomination for their work with Monicelli on I compagni (The Organizer, 1963), and in 1980, their script for Ettore Scola’s La terrazza (The Terrace) received the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes. They were both also credited with helping to write Sergio Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), although it appears that much of what they wrote was ultimately too funny and so not included in the final shooting script. After separating amicably from Scarpelli in the mid-1980s, Incrocci collaborated with Suso Cecchi D’Amico on Amanzio Todini’s I soliti ignoti vent’anni dopo (Big Deal after 20 Years, 1985) and worked on a number of minor films but gradually reduced his involvement in the industry in favor of teaching screenwriting privately. In 1990, he published his own screenwriting manual, Scriviamo un film (Let’s Write a Film). INDAGINE SU UN CITTADINO AL DI SOPRA DI OGNI SOSPETTO (INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, 1970). Film. One of the most entertaining as well as disturbing police-political thrillers of the early 1970s, Investigation was directed by Elio Petri and starred Gian Maria Volonté in one of his most impressive performances. Stylishly photographed by Luigi Kuveiller and punctuated by a whimsically sarcastic musical score by Ennio Morricone, the film tells the story of an unnamed police inspector, recently promoted from head of Homicide to the Political Division, who kills his beautiful lover in cold blood, intentionally leaving numerous and obvious clues. In the investigation that follows, he plays a cynical game of cat and mouse with his former colleagues by both prompting them toward the truth and, at the same time, using his new position in the Political Division to point them in the direction of a young left-wing activist who lived in the same building as the woman. He clearly enjoys his feeling of power and invulnerability when the other detectives follow the clues along their logical path but then, deferential to his status and authority, refuse to draw the obvious conclusion. In the end, he appears to tire of the game and disdainfully confesses to the crime. However, in the (imagined?) meeting with his political superiors that closes the film, he is exonerated rather than punished, and they clasp him to their bosom as one of their own. A quotation from Franz Kafka introduces the credits: “Whatever impression he makes on us, he is the servant of the Law. He belongs to the Law and is not answerable to human judgment.”

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The film’s truculent caricature of the police and its openly voiced cynicism toward politicians well reflected the widespread mistrust of constituted authority in Italy at the time, a distrust that would only increase in the following so-called “leaden years.” However, the film also found a warm reception abroad, being nominated for two Oscars, a Golden Globe, and the Palme d’or. In the event, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and received the International Federation of Film Critics Prize and the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. INGRASSIA, CICCIO (1922–2003). Actor. A vaudeville performer from a very young age, Ciccio (short for Francesco) Ingrassia met Franco Franchi while touring in the mid-1950s, and together they formed what would soon become one of the most successful comic acts in postwar Italian cinema. After making a name for themselves with their variety shows onstage, the duo appeared in very small roles in Mario Mattoli’s Appuntamento a Ischia (Rendezvous at Ischia, 1960). Then, during the next decade and a half, they came to star in more than 100 films of varying quality, many of them hastily concocted farces and parodies of other well-known films, such as Il bello il brutto e il cretino (The Handsome, the Ugly and the Stupid, 1967) and Indovina chi viene a merenda? (Guess Who’s Coming to Afternoon Tea?, 1968). Loved by the audiences who flocked to see the films but generally maligned by the critics who deplored their low-brow humor, the duo was nevertheless able to give better proof of their abilities in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Che cosa sono le nuvole?,” an episode of the compilation film Capriccio italiano (Caprice Italian Style, 1968), and as the Fox and the Cat in Luigi Comencini’s adaptation of Pinocchio (1972) for Italian television. Ingrassia also appeared on his own, playing the eccentric uncle who brazenly shouts “I want a woman” from the treetops in Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and winning a Nastro d’argento for his supporting role in Elio Petri’s caustic political satire Todo modo (1976). In 1991, he was also awarded a David di Donatello for his supporting role in Felice Farina’s Condominio (Condominium, 1991). Ingrassia’s most memorable performance, however, probably remains his masterful interpretation of Don Lollò, the antagonist of Zì Dima (played by Franchi) in the “La giara” episode of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Kaos (Chaos, 1984). Ingrassia himself also directed two films: Paolo il freddo (Paolo, the Cold-Blooded, 1974) and L’esorciccio (The Exorcist: Italian Style, 1975). ISTITUTO LUCE-CINECITTÀ. See L’UNIONE CINEMATOGRAFICA EDUCATIVA (LUCE; UNION OF EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY).

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ITALA FILM. Production company. Founded in 1905 by Carlo Rossi and William Remmert as Carlo Rossi & C., the company recruited a number of technicians from the French Pathé to become one of the first film manufacturing companies in Turin. Two years later, it was joined by a young accountant, Giovanni Pastrone, who helped reorganize its management procedures on a much firmer commercial basis. In 1908, with Rossi leaving to work for the Cines in Rome, the company was transformed into Itala Film, adopting Fixitè as its motto and principle. For the next decade, the company’s growth and development was ably guided by Pastrone, who demonstrated remarkable skills as manager, producer, director, and technician. One of Pastrone’s shrewdest moves was to entice the Pathé’s most successful comedian, André Deed, to Itala’s well-outfitted new studios in Turin, where Deed was able to turn out hundreds of the extremely popular Cretinetti films. At the same time, La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1911), directed by Pastrone himself, broke box office records in the United States, allowing Itala to set up a subsidiary in New York in 1913 and thus pave the way for the stellar success of Pastrone’s Cabiria there in 1914. Under Pastrone’s firm guidance, Itala distinguished itself for the quality of its literary adaptations and its costume melodramas while also exploiting the character of Maciste, the muscleman with a heart of gold who had first appeared in Cabiria, in a string of very popular films bearing his name. Segundo De Chomòn’s remarkable talents for special effects, also first seen in Cabiria, were further showcased in the brilliant animation of La guerra e il sogno di Momi (The War and the Dream of Momi, 1917). Nevertheless, by 1918 Pastrone had lost financial control of the company, which in 1919, in the general crisis that began to engulf the industry, was absorbed into the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union). In 1927, the derelict Itala studios in Turin were bought up by Stefano Pittaluga.

L LA DOLCE VITA (1960). Film. The most renowned Italian art film of the 1960s, La dolce vita, directed by Federico Fellini in 1959 and released in 1960, was Fellini’s acerbic, if rather fascinated, take on the glamorous, media-soaked, but ultimately empty lifestyle that had developed around Rome’s Via Veneto district in the wake of Hollywood’s colonization of the Tiber during the 1950s. The title, meaning literally “the sweet life,” was clearly inflected ironically, but many viewers mistakenly interpreted the film as an endorsement and a celebration of that new celebrity worship and media consciousness that was becoming part of the new Italy of the so-called economic miracle. The plot is willfully disconnected and episodic. Tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini, inimitably played by Marcello Mastroianni, flits around Rome for most of the film, usually accompanied by his photographer, Paparazzo, returning frequently to the Via Veneto to catch up with the latest gassip and events. Nurturing aspirations to being a serious writer but with neither the discipline nor the inspiration to realize it, Marcello drifts between sexual dalliances and journalistic assignments that include, among other things, showing a visiting international starlet, played by Anita Ekberg, the sights of Rome (prompting the legendary scene in which they both splash about in the Fountain of Trevi) and reporting on the “miraculous” apparition of the Virgin Mary to two children in a field on the outskirts of the city. In the course of his meanderings, he also visits an intellectual friend and writer whose professed love of music and literature masks a more deep-seated existential malaise that abruptly emerges when he kills his two small children before also shooting himself. Running as a thread through most of the film is Marcello’s attempt to escape from what he obviously feels is a cloying relationship with his official fiancée, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux). In the final episode, in what was judged to be one of the most scandalous and immoral scenes of the whole film, Marcello attends a wild party thrown by a recent divorcee, during which the hostess performs a self-conscious striptease and Marcello rides one of the female partygoers like a horse.

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Marcello Mastroianni in one of the most controversial scenes of La dolce vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini. Courtesy of Photofest.

Stylistically the film was something of a turning point for Fellini, who here abandoned forever any vestiges of his involvement with Neorealism, which still persisted in his previous Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957), embracing an unashamedly modernist idiom that would soon metamorphose into the postmodern self-referentiality of Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). At the same time, despite being shot mostly in a studio—the Via Veneto itself was meticulously reconstructed in the Cinecittà studios by Piero Gherardi—the film managed to convey the pulse of a changing, and changed, Italy rapidly careening into its own chaotic future. At its first gala screening in Milan in February 1960, the film caused a major furor, with many of the invited guests booing and hissing and Fellini himself being spat upon. In the days that followed, the film was vehemently attacked by the Catholic and conservative press, and a number of right-wing politicians even presented a proposal in Parliament to ban it. However, good sense eventually prevailed, and the film, having already received its certificate of release from the censorship board, was allowed to circulate freely. Due, at least in part, to all the publicity generated by the heated controversy, La dolce vita achieved unprecedented box office success, both in Italy and abroad, and was enthusiastically awarded the Palme d’or when presented at Cannes. In the United States, it subsequently received the New York Film Critics Prize for Best Foreign

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Film and four Oscar nominations, winning the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. As part of the film’s enduring legacy, the name of the photographer, Paparazzo, came to be widely used internationally from then on to designate any member of that race of invasive and aggressive celebrity photographers that has unfortunately continued to flourish to the present day. LABATE, WILMA (1949–). Director and screenwriter. After studying philosophy at the University of Rome, Labate began working for the national RAI television network. In 1990, with a number of documentaries already to her credit, she made Ciro il piccolo (Little Ciro), a sort of documentary on the city of Naples seen through the eyes of a young boy who wanders the streets for most of the night on his way to work at the fish markets in the early morning. Two years later, Labate directed her first feature, Ambrogio (1992), the story of a young girl in Italy in the late 1950s who joins the naval academy in order to fulfill her aspirations of becoming a ship’s captain. Following a number of other commercial documentaries, Labate’s second feature, La mia generazione (My Generation, 1996), tackled the difficult theme of political terrorism in Italy in the early 1980s. Still regarded by many as her best work to date, it won the International Federation of Film Critics Prize and was put forward as the Italian nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. After several other short films, she directed Domenica (Sunday, 2001), the moving story of a rebellious 12-year-old street girl in Naples (named Domenica) and the relationship that develops between her and the terminally ill policeman charged with bringing her in to make a statement. Two years later, after collaborating on the group documentary Lettere dalla Palestina (Letters from Palestine, 2002), Labate produced and directed MaledettaMia (Cursed Be Mia, 2003), a documentary portrait of five anarchic young people all attempting to present their objections to the established social system. Still passionately left-wing in her political orientation, in 2005 Labate published Il ragazzo con la maglietta a strisce (The Boy with the Striped Jumper), a book-length interview with the former leader of the Communist Refoundation Party, Fausto Bertinotti. Two years later, she returned to the big screen with Signorina Effe (Miss F, 2007), a fraught love story set in the context of the historic clash between blue-collar and white-collar workers at the FIAT car factory in Turin in 1980. She then contributed a short segment to the ensemble film All Human Rights for All (2008), a collective effort by 30 filmmakers to promote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, before collaborating on the screenplay of Ascanio Celestini’s La pecora nera (The Black Sheep, 2010). She subsequently returned to documentary filmmaking, codirecting Monicelli: La versione di Mario (Monicelli: Mario’s Version, 2012), Qualcosa di noi (Something about Us, 2014), Raccontare Venezia (To Narrate Venice, 2017), and, most recently, Arrivederci Saigon (Goodbye Saigon, 2018), in which she recounts the known but

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long-forgotten story of the hapless five young members of an Italian all-girl rock band who in 1968 unexpectedly came to spend three months rather than their scheduled four days entertaining American troops in Vietnam. LANCI, GIUSEPPE (1942–). Cinematographer. Better known as Beppe (short for Giuseppe), Lanci studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before serving an apprenticeship as assistant cameraman with Tonino Delli Colli, Mario Montuori, and Franco Di Giacomo. From 1979, he became the preferred cinematographer of Marco Bellocchio, photographing eight of his major films, while also working with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani on Kaos (Chaos, 1984) and Good Morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon, 1986); with Mauro Bolognini on La Veneziana (The Venetian Woman, 1985) and La villa del venerdì (Husbands and Lovers, 1992); and with Nanni Moretti on Palombella Rossa (Red Lob, 1988), Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), Aprile (April, 1996), and La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001). He also collaborated extensively with the younger generation of directors who emerged in the 1990s, working with, among others, Francesca Archibugi on Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes, 1994) and Daniele Luchetti on I piccoli maestri (Little Teachers, 1997). Internationally he served as director of photography for Margarethe Von Trotta’s Fiirchten und Lieben (Three Sisters, 1988) and, memorably, for Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom he produced the stunning images of Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983). Three years later, he was awarded the David di Donatello for his cinematography on Lina Wertmüller’s Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime, 1985). In the new millennium, he worked again with Wertmüller on Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Too Much Romance . . . It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers, 2004) and with the Taviani brothers again on La masseria delle allodole (The Lark Farm, 2007) before his last work to date, photographing Carlo Sarti’s Goodbye Mr. Zeus (2010). LATTUADA, ALBERTO (1914–2005). Photographer, writer, director, and screenwriter. A director of extraordinary versatility often characterized as merely eclectic, Lattuada was born into a cultured Milanese family and was exposed to all the arts from a very young age. His father, a composer and musician who often took his son to the opera at La Scala, also scored a number of films for Alessandro Blasetti and Mario Camerini. While still in high school, Lattuada began writing and editing literary magazines, and later, as an architecture student at the Politecnico of Milan, he also contributed art criticism and film reviews to several cultural journals.

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He began his career in the film industry in 1933 as a set decorator and designer. In 1938, together with fellow cinephiles Luigi Comencini and Mario Ferrari, he founded the Cineteca (Film Library) of Milan while at the same time publishing Occhio quadrato (Square Eye), a book of arresting photographs of the poorer quarters of the city. After working as screenwriter and assistant director to Mario Soldati on Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1941) and Ferdinando Maria Poggioli’s Sissignora (Yes, Madam, 1942), he made his directorial debut with Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1943), a stylish adaptation of Emilio De Marchi’s 19thcentury novel of the same name. The film’s elegant formal composition and visual beauty immediately located him within the camp of the so-called calligraphers. Displaying a versatility that would become his trademark, in the immediate postwar period he made a number of films in the Neorealist mold, among them Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946), the story of a returned soldier who unwittingly becomes an outlaw, clearly influenced by American gangster films; Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender, 1947), which earned him his first Nastro d’argento; Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948); and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1949), a lyrical story of peasant struggles set in the 19th century. In 1950, he joined forces with a young Federico Fellini in producing and directing Luci del varietà (Variety Lights), which was received with positive critical interest but proved a financial disaster for both of them. The situation for Lattuada was redeemed by the international box office success of Anna (1951), an erotic melodrama starring Silvana Mangano as a nightclub singer who becomes a nun to atone for her previous selfishness, and then Il cappotto (The Overcoat, 1952), the adaptation of a tragicomic short story by Nikolai Gogol. A year later, Lattuada made “Gli italiani si voltano” (“Italians Turn to Look”) for Cesare Zavattini’s compilation film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953). By this time, he had already directed La lupa (She Wolf, 1953), adapted from a novel by Giovanni Verga. A refined eroticism, already present in his earlier work, now came to characterize his films, and he began to become almost as famous for his discovery of a number of beautiful young actresses as for the films in which he showcased their talents. Nevertheless, many of his films also continued to carry out a mild social critique as in the highlighting of middle-class hypocrisy in La spiaggia (Riviera, 1954) or in the many social satires produced in parallel to the commedia all’italiana, such as Mafioso (1962) and Don Giovanni in Sicilia (Don Juan in Sicily, 1967). He also received high praise for his adaptation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s 16th-century comedy La mandragola (The Mandrake, 1965), in which he employed the comic actor Totò to play the key role of Fra’ Timoteo. Ever eclectic, he then produced an amusing parody of the then popular spy film in Matchless (1967), which he followed with the epic anti-

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war film Fraulein Doktor (1969). In the 1970s, he became increasingly identified with films with an explicit erotic content, such as Le farò da padre (Bambina, 1974), Oh Serafina! (1976), and La cicala (The Cricket, 1980), the last impounded by the censors on charges of obscenity, although it was eventually released. In the 1980s, Lattuada largely abandoned the big screen in favor of television, for which he directed, among others, a four-part miniseries on Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo, 1985) and another miniseries, Due fratelli (Brothers, 1988). Having occasionally acted in small roles in his own films, he also made a final cameo appearance in Carlo Mazzacurati’s Il toro (The Bull, 1994). One of Italy’s most popular and critically respected directors, in 1994 Lattuada was recognized at the David di Donatello Awards with the Franco Cristaldi Prize for his contribution to Italian cinema. LENZI, UMBERTO (1931–2017). Screenwriter, director, and novelist. A cult director working mostly in genre films (and under a number of aliases, Humphrey Humbert, Harry Kirkpatrick, and Hank Milestone among them), Lenzi had abandoned legal studies at university in order to train in filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After serving as assistant director on Domenico Paolella’s pirate fantasy Il terrore dei mari (Guns of the Black Witch, 1961), Lenzi directed his own female pirate adventure, Le avventure di Mary Read (Queen of the Seas, 1961), which was followed by a host of other swashbuckling adventure fantasies such as Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem (Sandokan, the Great, 1963) and I pirati della malesia (The Pirates of Malaysia, 1964). After Attentato ai tre grandi (Desert Commandos, 1967), a desert war drama portraying an attempt by German commandos to assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at their meeting in Casablanca, several spy films, and a number of Spaghetti Westerns, Lenzi made the first foray into the giallo with Orgasmo (Orgasm, but released in the United States as Paranoia, 1968), followed by Così dolce . . . così perversa (So Sweet . . . So Perverse, 1969). In the 1970s, he became particularly renowned for his mastery of the poliziesco genre while also achieving international cult status with Il paese del sesso selvaggio (Sacrifice!, 1972), the film that launched the cannibal horror cycle in Italy, to which Lenzi would contribute several classics of the genre, including Mangiati vivi (Eaten Alive, 1980) and the notorious Cannibal ferox (Make Them Die Slowly, 1981), proudly marketed as “the most violent film ever made!” In the 1980s, he continued to work across most of the major genres, frequently under a handful of pseudonyms, but came back to prominence with the voodoo horror Demoni 3 (Black Demons, 1991). His last film was the police thriller Hornsby and Rodriguez—sfida criminale (Mean Tricks, 1992). Having had a penchant for writing from his earliest days, in 2008 he

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began publishing what would be a long and a very commercially successful series of gialli in which the central murder mystery was regularly connected with the shooting of a particular well-known film or event in film history. LEONE, SERGIO (1929–1989). Director, screenwriter, and producer. The son of silent film director Roberto Roberti (Vincenzo Leone) and actress Bice Walerian, Leone entered the film industry at a very young age, serving as an unpaid assistant and appearing in a small role in one of his father’s last films when he was only 12. In the immediate postwar period, he worked in various capacities on a host of films, including making an appearance as one of the German seminarians sheltering from the sudden rainstorm in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). In the 1950s, he served as assistant director on many of the big-budget American productions being shot at Cinecittà, including Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo vadis? (1951), Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956), and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959). Having also, during this period, regularly served as assistant director to Mario Bonnard, he took over directing Bonnard’s remake of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959) at short notice but subsequently chose to go back to working as assistant director to Robert Aldrich on the ill-fated Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) while writing and directing his own swordand-sandal epic, Il colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes, 1961). Real success, however, came with Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964, released in the United States in 1967), the film with which Leone is credited with having given birth to the Western all’italiana, or as it often disparagingly came to be known outside of Italy, the Spaghetti Western. Made on a shoestring budget and under the pseudonym Bob Robertson, the film proved to be an unexpected but enormous commercial success, prompting Leone to make the four other Westerns that confirmed his mastery of the genre, Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968), and Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker, 1971). For the next decade, Leone limited himself to producing films for other directors, including Tonino Valerii’s Il mio nome è nessuno (My Name Is Nobody, 1973) and Carlo Verdone’s directorial debut, Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful, 1980), while preparing to make what many regard as his most accomplished film, C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984), the magnificent gangster epic that finally brought him the recognition of a Nastro d’argento as well as nominations for both BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. This was to have been followed by an even more spectacular film on the German siege of Leningrad during World War II, which was apparently in the final stages of preparation at the time of Leone’s untimely death in 1989.

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LETO, MARCO (1931–2016). Critic, screenwriter, and director. After graduating from university with a degree in law, Leto enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He subsequently worked as a film critic for Il Globo, while also serving as an assistant to directors Mario Monicelli, Florestano Vancini, and Renato Castellani. In 1963, he began working for state television and for a period also held the post of artistic director at the Istituto LUCE before directing his first feature, La villeggiatura (Black Holiday, 1972), a rigorous and particularly perceptive analysis of Fascism widely regarded as his best film and for which he received numerous awards, including a Nastro d’argento and the Mario Gromo Award for Best Director. While continuing to produce a host of award-winning programs for television, he directed his second feature film, Al piacere di rivederla (Till We Meet Again, 1976). He taught at the Centro Sperimentale between 1983 and 1987 and coauthored several novels before directing Una donna spezzata (The Woman Destroyed, 1988), closely followed by L’uscita (The Exit, 1989) and A proposito di quella strana ragazza (About That Strange Girl, 1989), both of which tackled the difficult theme of political terrorism. He subsequently directed L’inchiesta (The Investigation, 1991), adapted from one of his earlier novels, and worked as a director of dubbing while also publishing another novel, a neo-noir titled L’intrattenimento (Entertainment, 2001). In retirement in the new millennium, he published a collection of short stories, Altri tempi (Other Times, 2008) and two more novels: Corrispondenza satellitare (Satellite Correspondence, 2008) and Missione a Mosca (Mission to Moscow, 2010). LIZZANI, CARLO (1922–2013). Director, screenwriter, film historian, and critic. A passionate cinephile from a very early age, Lizzani began attending the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in his late teens while also contributing articles to film journals, including the prestigious Cinema. After participating in the Resistance movement during the war, he acted the role of a parish priest killed by the Germans in Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946) before serving as assistant director to Roberto Rossellini on Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947). At the same time, he worked with Giuseppe De Santis on the screenplays of Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and made a number of socially committed documentaries before directing his first feature, Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951), a film on the Resistance movement in northern Italy. Due to vehement opposition from the ruling centerright Christian Democrat authorities who refused to offer such a film any support, the film was financed autonomously through a film workers’ cooperative.

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After Ai margini della metropoli (At the Edge of the City, 1953) and “L’amore che si paga” (“The Love One Pays For”), one of the five episodes of the compilation film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953), Lizzani directed Cronache di poveri amanti (Chronicle of Poor Lovers, 1954), the adaptation of an anti-Fascist novel by Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini, which was again produced by an independent cooperative and again strongly opposed by the authorities on the grounds of alleged left-wing bias. Despite concerted pressure from the Italian authorities, who blocked the film’s international release for several years, the film was highly acclaimed at Cannes, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize. Having by this time also published an authoritative history of Italian cinema, Lizzani then veered more toward the mainstream with Lo svitato (Screwball, 1956), a comedy featuring the then little-known Dario Fo, before journeying to China, still largely closed to Westerners, to make the feature documentary La muraglia cinese (Behind the Great Wall, 1958). After Esterina (1959), Lizzani returned to the war years and to the Resistance movement with Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), L’oro di Roma (Gold of Rome, 1961), and Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial, 1963), films that confirmed both his directorial professionalism and his leftist social commitment. In the following years, he continued to make films with a historical or political focus, among them Mussolini ultimo atto (Last Days of Mussolini, 1974) and Caro Gorbaciov (Dear Gorbachev, 1988), but he also worked extensively within many of the more popular genres, making Westerns such as Un fiume di dollari (River of Dollars, 1966, as Lee W. Beaver) and Requiescant (Kill and Pray, 1967)—the latter memorable not least for the appearance of Pier Paolo Pasolini as a revolutionary Mexican priest—and urban crime and gangster thrillers such as Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four, 1968), Torino nera (Black Turin, 1972), and Crazy Joe (1974). In 1980, while serving a four-year term as director of the Venice Festival, he returned to a cinema of strong social commitment with Fontamara (1980), a moving adaptation of a novel by Ignazio Silone about the plight of peasants in southern Italy set during the Fascist period. In 1996, Lizzani’s passion for both history and the cinema came together in Celluloide (Celluloid, 1996), a fictional re-creation of the making of Rossellini’s landmark film Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945). He subsequently worked largely for television, directing, among others, Maria Josè, l’ultima regina (Maria Josè, the Last Queen, 2002), an enormously popular miniseries on the life of the daughter-in-law of King Victor Emmanuel III, and Le cinque giornate di Milano (The Five Days of Milan, 2004), a two-part telefilm on the revolutionary uprising in Milan in 1848. Before taking his own life in 2013, he made a number of TV documentaries, including one on fellow writer-director Giuseppe De Santis (2008), and Il mio Novecento (My Twentieth Century, 2010), a personal appraisal of the century that he had lived through.

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LO CASCIO, LUIGI (1967–). Actor, director, and writer. With an interest in theater from his early teens, Lo Cascio nevertheless undertook medical studies at the University of Palermo with the intention of following in the footsteps of his father’s side of the family and becoming a psychiatrist. While moonlighting and touring in a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, he decided to abandon his medical career for a life in the theater and so moved to Rome to study acting at the Silvio D’Amico Academy of Dramatic Art. Having graduated in 1992, he proceeded to build a solid reputation acting in many plays of the classical repertoire, in productions designed by leading directors such Elio De Capitani, Carlo Cecchi, and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. What would become his parallel, and stellar, career in films began almost by accident when he was encouraged by his uncle, also an established film actor, to audition for the lead role in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Cento Passi (One Hundred Steps, 2000). His performance in the film, which recounted the story of political activist Peppino Impastato, who had been brutally murdered by the Mafia in the 1970s, earned him both the David di Donatello and the Italian Golden Globe for Best Actor. A year later, he attracted both the prestigious Pasinetti Award and the Coppa Volpi at the Venice Festival for his role in Giuseppe Piccioni’s Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes, 2001) before going on to give what for many has remained his most memorable performance as Nicola, the younger of the two brothers (and a psychiatrist), in Giordana’s six-hour epic family saga La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003). He then played the hapless Vito, trailing a morally dubious brother-in-law through Bari in an attempt to retrieve a stolen car, in Alessandro Piva’s dark comedy Mio cognato (My Brother-in-Law, 2003) and then the conflicted police inspector in Eros Puglielli’s horror thriller Occhi di cristallo (Eyes of Crystal, 2004). He continued to play conflicted males in Giuseppe Piccioni’s La vita che vorrei (The Life That I Want, 2004), Cristina Comencini’s La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell, 2005), and Roberta Torre’s Mare nero (The Dark Sea, 2006) before returning to Mafia territory, although this time as a participant rather than a nemesis, in Il dolce e l’amaro (The Sweet and the Bitter, 2007). After a very brief but crucial appearance as the adult Angelo Torancelli in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008), he shouldered the part of the revolutionary Republican, Domenico, in Mario Martone’s revisitation of the Risorgimento in Noi credevamo (We Believed, 2010). At the same time, he continued to produce innovative work on the stage, performing, among others, his own adaptation of Euripides’s Bacchae as La caccia, as well as adapting Kafka’s short story “Der Bau” in his multimedia stage spectacle La tana. Returning to the big screen, he experimented with cowriting and directing himself in La città ideale (The Ideal City, 2012), the story of a socially committed architect and obsessive environmentalist who, following a minor accident in a borrowed car one rainy night, comes to be

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inexorably drawn into a Kafkaesque legal nightmare occasioning a deep existential crisis. He subsequently appeared in a supporting role in Paolo Virzì’s Il capitale umano (Human Capital, 2013) before being one of the two brothers in conflict in Ivano De Matteo’s explosive family drama I nostri ragazzi (The Dinner, 2014). In 2015, he was drawn back to the stage at the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, directing and acting in an iconoclastic and extremely physical production of Shakespeare’s Othello, which he himself had rendered into archaic Sicilian. After amusing himself playing the grand villain, Walter Mercurio, in Sydney Sibilia’s Smetto quando voglio—Masterclass (I Can Quit Whenever I Want: Masterclass, 2017) and Smetto quando voglio—Ad honorem (I Can Quit Whenever I Want: Ad Honorem, 2017), he was again onstage in 2018 in an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamberlain the Great and alongside Sergio Rubini in a stage rendition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In the same year, as well as providing a powerful performance in Nicola Bellucci’s alpine noir Il mangiatore di pietre (The Stone Eater), he also published his first novel, Ogni ricordo un fiore (Every Memory a Flower). In 2019, even as he was about to be awarded the Nastro d’agento for his supporting role in Marco Bellocchio’s Il traditore (The traitor, 2019) he was appearing onstage at the Teatro Astra of Turin in Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), a theatrical rendition of Primo Levi’s 1975 novel. LO CHIAMAVANO JEEG ROBOT (THEY CALL ME JEEG, 2015). Film. First feature film of actor and short filmmaker Gabriele Mainetti, Lo chamavano Jeeg Robot was widely hailed as a “revelation” and something of a milestone in Italian cinema of the new millennium when it premiered at the Festa del Cinema di Roma on 17 October 2015. Such a laudatory judgment appeared amply confirmed when, following its excellent performance at the box office during its first theatrical release in February of the following year, it was nominated for 16 David di Donatello awards, winning seven of them, as well as two of its nine nominations for the Nastro d’argento. Declaring its genre and pop culture orientation from its very title, the film recounts the story of the unremarkable Enzo Ceccotti, a morose and unsociable small-time thief who inadvertently acquires superhuman powers when he comes to be soaked in radioactive waste while evading a police chase by hiding in Rome’s Tiber River. However, he only becomes aware of his new powers when, after spending some time recovering from toxic shock in his squalid apartment in one of the seedier suburbs of Rome, he agrees to accompany Sergio, a member of the local criminal gang who lives in the apartment below, to a rendezvous aimed at retrieving a shipment of drugs. The rendezvous, held at the top of an unfinished building site, goes awry. Sergio is shot and Enzo falls from the building but discovers himself unhurt. Running back to his apartment, he is able to confirm that he has acquired superhuman

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strength and resilience by being able to bend a metal radiator with ease. Having the powers but not yet the morals of a respectable superhero, his first thought is to go into the city and use his Herculean strength to rip an automatic teller from the wall. The exploit proves futile since such tellers immediately release a dye that makes their banknotes unusable, but the black hooded figure’s feat has been recorded by the security cameras and is soon being broadcast on screens throughout the city. Enzo is able to soon make better use of his powers when members of Sergio’s motley gang, led by their maniacal leader who goes by the name of Zingaro (Gypsy), come to Sergio’s apartment looking for the drugs and are about to torture his daughter, Alessia, in order to get their hands on them. Using his newly acquired super-strength, Enzo fends them off, and they leave promising vengeance. Having been traumatized by abuse at an early age, Alessia now lives almost completely in the fantasy world of Japanese anime and so interprets Enzo’s strength and actions as signs that he is the manga hero Hiroshi Shiba, who, when needed, turns into the steel robot, Jeeg. Enzo is loath to accept the identification, but, knowing that Sergio is dead and Alessia is now alone, he reluctantly undertakes her care. In order to have the means to move them both away from the area, he becomes the super-criminal again and successfully robs an armored cash-delivery van, under the nose of a furious Zingaro and his gang, who had themselves been planning the same heist. Enzo does move Alessia to a safer place, but Zingaro and one of his henchmen discover it and kidnap Alessia. With Alessia now in his power and held in a secret location, Zingaro confronts Enzo and threatens to kill Alessia unless Enzo reveals how and where he acquired his superpowers. Reluctantly Enzo leads Zingaro to the spot on the Tiber; however, the Neapolitan gang to whom Zingaro had promised the drugs but never delivered, arrive and a shoot-out ensues. In the meantime, Alessia, who has succeeded in escaping her captor, also arrives but is caught in the crossfire and dies in Enzo’s arms. The Neapolitans gain the upper hand by using a flamethrower on Zingaro, who dives into the water at the same spot where Enzo had taken refuge at the beginning of the film. As Enzo also makes his own escape and the Neapolitan camorristi leave, we see Zingaro surface ominously from the Tiber in an exact repetition of Enzo’s emergence at the beginning of the film. Soon after, clearly now exercizing the same superhuman strength that we had previously associated with Enzo, Zingaro is wreaking bloodthirsty revenge on the camorristi in their lair, but, having been obsessed from the beginning of the film with not only gaining power but also celebrity, he gleefully films it all on his smartphone and subsequently broadcasts it to the entire city, with threats of violence for anyone who stands in his way. Dejected and distraught by his failure to prevent Alessia’s death, Enzo wanders the Roman countryside aimlessly but witnesses a major accident that leaves a young girl trapped in a burning vehicle. The good angel in him

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is awakened, and like the Jeeg Robot that Alessia believed him to be, he runs to rip open the car and save the girl. Soon after, looking over the shoulder of the girl’s mother who is embracing him in gratitude for saving her daughter, he sees Zingaro’s haughty face on the screen on the wall of a nearby kiosk announcing the destruction he intends to wreak on the whole city. In a flash, he understands where Zingaro will strike and commandeers a motor scooter in order to reach Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, where a major football match is under way. The stage is thus set for a superhero final showdown, which duly ensues in the area below the crowded stadium. As Enzo arrives, Zingaro has set up a huge bomb in a van that has been timed to soon explode, and Enzo must battle him in order to defuse it. Superhuman blows are traded as the seconds tick down. In the end, Enzo succeeds in getting his hands on the ticking bomb and runs to throw it into the Tiber but is caught again by Zingaro at the last minute and, as a result, superhero and supervillain plunge together into the calm waters that soon erupt, landing Zingaro’s severed head at the feet of terrified onlookers. Has Enzo/Jeeg also perished? In the memorable finale, as a voice-over, apparently from a television screen, reports the battle and ponders what constitutes a superhero, we see Enzo, looking out over Rome from the highest point in the Colosseum, finally pulling on the Jeeg face mask that Alessia had been knitting for him throughout the film, thus explictly undertaking the guardianship of the city from now on. While it must be clear, even from this brief summary, that the film plays with the clichés of a number of different genres, its merit, due in no small measure to the screenwriting talents of Mainetti and Nicola Gaglianone, lies in its extremely coherent integration of them all in order to create a distinctively Italian superhero. To this end, its utilization of Rome not as a functional set but as narrative texture is all important. Furthermore, while unashamedly displaying both its Italianness and its genre affiliations, the film undoubtedly also presents auteurist credentials with Mainetti having not only independently financed, produced, and directed the film but also composed its original musical score. Yet, if the film was able to return more than five million euros at the box office over an outlay of less than two million, it was also due to one of the best marketing campaigns mounted in recent years by its distributor, Lucky Red. Well before its theatrical release in February 2016, the film gained a foothold on the internet via a designated website, blog, and a Facebook fanpage that attracted thousands of likes. At the same time, the film was also screened at the Lucca Comics and Games convention, the most important comics festival in Europe, in October 2015. Five days before the film’s scheduled opening, the most widely read newspaper in Italy, La Gazetta dello Sport, offered its readers a 32-page Jeeg comic specially created by

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four of Italy’s most prominent cartoonists and available with four different covers. The film was then released on 25 February 2016 on 200 screens and, in two weeks, had earned back its entire outlay. After being released in France and Germany, the film also had a limited release in the United States and, in July 2017, became available worldwide on Netflix. As the American trade paper Variety put it, Italy finally had its very own superhero. LO VERSO, ENRICO (1964–). Actor. One of the most distinctive young faces to emerge in the New Italian Cinema of the early 1990s, Lo Verso studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before making his first screen appearance in Antonello Grimaldi’s Nulla ci può fermare (Nothing Can Stop Us, 1988). After playing strong supporting roles in Pasquale Squitieri’s Atto di dolore (Act of Sorrow, 1990), he achieved international renown as Antonio, the young carabiniere charged with escorting the two hapless children to Sicily in Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). He subsequently starred in several other major films by Amelio, including Lamerica (1994) and Così ridevano (So They Laughed, 1999), while also providing strong performances in, among others, Ricky Tognazzi’s La scorta (The Escort, 1993), Carmine Amoroso’s Come mi vuoi (As You Want Me, 1997), Michele Placido’s Del perduto amore (Of Love Lost, 1998), and Giovanni Davide Maderna’s L’amore imperfetto (Imperfect Love, 2001). At the same time, he also worked extensively outside Italy, appearing in films such as Gerard Corbiau’s baroque extravaganza Farinelli (1994), Philippe Berenger’s Méditerranées, and Ridley Scott’s horror classic Hannibal (2001). In the new millennium, he played Judas in Raffaele Mertes’s television biopic Judas (2001) and Fidel Castro in Josh Evans’s Che Guevara (2005) before incarnating the ruthless Mafia boss, Rocco Scalia, in Claudio Fragasso’s Milano Palermo: Il ritorno (Milano–Palermo: The Return, 2007). After a supporting role in Gian Paolo Cugno’s La bella società (High Society, 2010), he starred as Karà Mustafà, the Supreme Commander of the Turkish army besieging Vienna in 1683 in Renzo Martinelli’s big-budget historical epic 11 settembre 1683 (Day of the Seige, 2012). There followed two shorts directed by Edoardo Ponti, Il turno di notte lo fanno le stelle (The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars, 2012) and a nonspeaking part in Voce umana (Human Voice, 2014), the adaptation of a monologue by Jean Cocteau, which had been already brought to the screen by Roberto Rossellini in 1984, but here starring Ponti’s mother, Sophia Loren, in the role previously taken by Anna Magnani. After portraying the courageous newspaper editor and antiMafia activist killed by the Mafia in Sebastiano Rizzo’s Nomi e cognomi (Names and Surnames, 2015) and playing a Mafia underling in Enrico Lando’s comedy Quel bravo ragazzo (That Fine Boy, 2016), Lo Verso managed a very creditable impersonation of Michelangelo Buonaroti in Ema-

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nuele Imbucci’s biopic Michelangelo—Infinito (2017). In the same year, he returned to the theater and gave a prize-winning performance in a stage adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s Uno, nessumo, centomila (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand), directed by Alessandra Pizzi.

Enrico Lo Verso in Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994). Courtesy of Photofest.

LOLLOBRIGIDA, GINA (1927–). Actress. Soon to become one of the most popular and internationally renowned Italian actresses of postwar Italian cinema, Gina (short for Luigina) Lollobrigida made her first fleeting appearance on the screen as an extra in Riccardo Freda’s Aquila nera (The Return of the Black Eagle, 1946). After doing small, and often uncredited, parts in a number of minor films, her stunning looks and her acting abilities began to emerge more clearly in Giorgio Pastina’s Alina (1950) and Duillio Coletti’s Miss Italia (Miss Italy, 1950), the latter bringing her the proposal of a seven-year contract in Hollywood from American magnate Howard Hughes, an offer that she went to America to accept but soon reneged on under pressure from her husband and manager, Milko Skofic. Returning to Italy she acted major roles in Pietro Germi’s La città si difende (Four Ways Out, 1951) and Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951) but scored her first major international success in France in the title role of Christian-Jaque’s Fanfan la tulipe (Fan-Fan the

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Gina Lollobrigida in Carol Reed’s Trapeze (1956). Courtesy of Photofest.

Tulip, 1952), which led to her thereafter being known simply as “La Lollo.” Back in Italy, she distinguished herself in Mario Soldati’s La provinciale (The Wayward Wife, 1953) before scoring an even bigger hit as the sweet but wild young country bumpkin in Luigi Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia

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(Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), a role that earned her a Nastro d’argento and a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Actress. The success was then repeated by her reprise of the role in the equally popular sequel, Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky). Much in demand, both in Italy and abroad, she subsequently starred in a host of both European and Hollywood productions, including Carol Reed’s Trapeze (1956), King Vidor’s The Queen of Sheba (1959), and Jean Delannoy’s Venere imperiale (Imperial Venus, 1962), in which she played Napoleon’s sister, Paulina Bonaparte, in an interpretation that brought her both a David di Donatello and a second Nastro d’argento. After appearing opposite Sean Connery in Bill Dearden’s Woman of Straw (1964) and in Alessandro Blasetti’s Io, io, io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others, 1966), she received David di Donatello and Golden Globe nominations for her role in the film for which she is probably best remembered in America, Buonasera Signora Campbell (Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, 1968), a Hollywood comedy directed by Melvin Frank. Following a serious highway accident in 1969 and although still very much in demand, she began to withdraw from the cinema in the early 1970s. She played the Blue Fairy in Luigi Comencini’s highly acclaimed television miniseries Le avventure di Pinocchio, later released as a film (Pinocchio, 1972), and appeared with David Niven in Jerzy Skolimowski’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave (1972), but she thereafter retired from cinema to follow her passion for photography. After having published many books of photographs, organized art exhibitions, and, in the new millennium, been appointed ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2018 she was honored with her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. LOMBARDO, GOFFREDO (1920–2005). Producer and distributor. Son of the founder of the Titanus film company, Gustavo Lombardo, and silent diva Leda Gys, Lombardo graduated in law from the University of Rome before joining the film industry as a scene painter in the late 1930s. After the war, he joined his father as an assistant producer and, on his father’s death, in 1951 took over the company, greatly improving its fortunes through the production of a series of enormously popular melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo. With a keen eye for what would be successful at the box office, Lombardo also produced Luigi Comencini’s top-rated Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953) and its two equally popular sequels, Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky) and Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955), the last showcasing both the looks and talents of a still little-known Sophia Loren. For Lombardo, however, commercial success was not an end in itself, and he used the profits from these and other popular films to support auteurist cine-

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ma, distributing and promoting the films of emerging young directors like Ermanno Olmi and Valerio Zurlini, as well as producing Federico Fellini’s Il bidone (The Swindle, 1955), Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), and Vittorio De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women, 1960). However, budget overruns on Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) and Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) put the company into serious financial difficulties, and Lombardo was soon forced to sell the Titanus studios, although he succeeded in keeping the distribution arm of the company intact. Continuing to display courage and foresight, he financed Dario Argento’s directorial debut, L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), as well as Giuseppe Tornatore’s first film, Il camorrista (The Professor, 1986). Nevertheless, after a long and productive career during which he was awarded the Nastro d’argento twice and the David di Donatello three times, in 1989, in the wake of a disappointing response to Luigi Comencini’s Buon Natale . . . BuonAnno (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, 1989), Lombardo decided to retire from the industry, leaving the company in the hands of his son Guido. In 1995, he was honored at the Venice Festival with a Special Golden Lion for his entire career. LOMBARDO, GUSTAVO (1885–1951). Distributor and producer. A key figure in the history of the Italian film industry, Lombardo established one of the first film distribution companies in Naples in 1904. In 1908, he founded the monthly magazine Lux to publicize films and advertise their availability, and a year later his Società Italiana Gustavo Lombardo Anonima had become the official distributor for most of the major Italian and foreign companies, including Gaumont, Éclair, Comerio, Vitagraph, Itala, and Aquila. At a time when cinema owners still bought their films outright by the meter from producers, Lombardo strongly championed the novel idea of exhibitors hiring films from distributors. In 1911, as both a distributor and exhibitor himself, he achieved a major coup with his effective launch of Milano Films’ milestone full-length feature film L’Inferno, a feat he outdid with the spectacular Roman premiere of Itala’s Cabiria in 1914. In 1915, still in Naples, he greatly extended his distribution network with the creation of Monopolio Grandi Films (Monopoly Great Films). In 1917, he expanded into production by forming Lombardo Film, one of the few companies that refused to join the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union) and thus managed to weather the crisis that engulfed the industry in the early 1920s. In 1928, Lombardo moved his operations to Rome and founded the production company Titanus, providing it with its own studios at the Farnesina. Although the number of films Lombardo himself produced during this period was relatively small,

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two of them, Fermo con le mani (Hands Off Me!, 1937) and Animali pazzi (Crazy Animals, 1939), were historically significant since they effectively launched the film career of the great comic actor Totò. In the immediate postwar period, Lombardo remained a major presence in the industry. Again he produced very few films but among them was Catene (Chains, 1949), the first of a long line of teary but extremely popular melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, which would sustain the company’s fortunes in the 1950s when it would be managed by his son, Goffredo. LOREN, SOPHIA (1934–). Actress. The most nationally celebrated and internationally renowned Italian actress of the postwar period, Sofia Villani Scicolone was born illegitimately in Rome and grew up in one of the poorer quarters of Naples, where her mother had taken refuge at the beginning of World War II. After the war, she and her mother both returned to Rome with hopes of a career in the movies. Under the name of Sofia Lazzaro, she posed for magazines and photoromances before being runner-up in a beauty contest where her looks caught the attention of film producer Carlo Ponti, who soon after became both her mentor and her husband. Alternatively under the names Scicolone and Lazzaro, she appeared in small parts in a dozen films made at Cinecittà in the early 1950s before being induced by veteran Italian producer Gustavo Lombardo to change her name to Sophia Loren. She was soon playing more substantial roles and even graduated to the lead in minor films such as Mario Mattoli’s Due notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with Cleopatra, 1953), in which she played both the Queen of the Nile and her lookalike slave girl, opposite up-and-coming Alberto Sordi. By 1954, she had begun to make her mark in quality films like Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954) and, a year later, substituted for the already established star Gina Lollobrigida in the third of the extremely popular Pane e amore films, Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955). By this time, she was also frequently being paired with Marcello Mastroianni in films such as Alessandro Blasetti’s Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954) and Mario Camerini’s La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, 1955). Thus, in a few years she had taken her place, alongside the reigning Lollobrigida, as one of the two leading ladies of the Italian silver screen. At this point, Ponti, with whom Loren was now living, decided she was ready for a career in Hollywood. In her first American film, Stanley Kramer’s The Pride and the Passion (1957), Loren shared star billing with Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. In the host of films that followed, among them Legend of the Lost (1957), Boy on a Dolphin (1957), Desire under the Elms (1958), Black Orchid (1958), Houseboat (1958), and Heller in Pink Tights (1960), she appeared with all of Hollywood’s leading men, including John Wayne, Alan Ladd, William Holden, and Anthony Quinn. Having become a

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celebrity as well as a star in the United States, Loren returned to Italy, where she achieved her first great critical triumph playing the role of the mother in De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), a part that originally had been earmarked for Anna Magnani. Her brilliant performance in the demanding role earned her worldwide acclaim and a plethora of awards, including the Nastro d’argento at home, Best Actress at Cannes, and the first Academy Award given to an actress in a foreign-language film. In the following years, she continued to alternate between appearing in big-budget Hollywood and international spectaculars and working in Italy, mostly with De Sica, who, in films such as Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), continued to judiciously pair her with Marcello Mastroianni. Many of the roles that she undertook in international productions, such as Peter Ustinov’s Lady L (1965) or Charles Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), successfully promoted her as an icon of feminine glamour and beauty but seldom exploited her true strengths as an actress. These would only really return to the fore in Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), where she again appeared with Mastroianni in a moving performance that earned her both the Nastro d’argento and the David di Donatello. Although her international reputation for beauty and glamour continued to flourish, her image in Italy was considerably tarnished in the late 1970s by allegations of, and then a conviction for, tax fraud. She subsequently largely withdrew from the cinema and, during the 1980s, appeared only as the mother in a number of television miniseries and in Dino Risi’s television version of La ciociara (Running Away, 1989). She returned triumphantly to the big screen, however, at the beginning of the 1990s, appearing in Lina Wertmüller’s Sabato, domenica e lunedì (Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 1990), a film that, as the adaptation of a stage play by Eduardo De Filippo, brought her back to her Neapolitan roots. This was followed by a cameo appearance and a final reunion with Mastroianni in Robert Altman’s satire of the fashion industry Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994), where, at the age of 60, she was able to reprise her famous striptease from Ieri, oggi e domani to great effect. After playing the much more difficult role of a Jewish mother of five living in Algiers during World War II in Roger Hanin’s Soleil (Sun, 1997), she worked again with Wertmüller in the made-for-television Francesca e Nunziata (2001) before giving a very touching performance as an older woman in Between Strangers (2002), a Canadian production directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. She starred again in Wertmüller’s Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Too Much Romance . . . It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers, 2004) before being again directed by her son, Edoardo, in La voce umana (The Human Voice, 2013), the adaptation of a theatrical text by Jean Cocteau that had already been adapted for the screen by Roberto Rossellini as one of the two episodes of his L’amore (1948), in which the solo female role had

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Sophia Loren in Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), directed by Vittorio De Sica. Courtesy of Photofest.

been acted by the inimitable Anna Magnani. The film was screened at Cannes in 2014 as part of the festival’s celebration of Loren’s 80th birthday, and in which she participated with a masterclass in acting. In the same year, she published her autobiography, Ieri, oggi, domani: la mia vita (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life).

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Among the myriad prizes and awards she received throughout the years are the honorary Oscar she was awarded for her lifetime achievement in 1991 and the Golden Lion for her entire career bestowed on her at the Venice Festival in 1998. LOY, NANNI (1925–1995). Actor, director, screenwriter. Giovanni Loy, born into an aristocratic family in Sardinia, moved to Rome in his teens and attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia while studying at university for his law degree. After serving an apprenticeship as assistant director on a number of films, including Luigi Zampa’s Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial, 1952) and Anni facili (Easy Years, 1953), he collaborated with Gianni Puccini on the direction of Parola di ladro (Honor among Thieves, 1957) and Il marito (The Husband, 1958) before making his first solo direction with Un audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco in Milan, 1959), a sequel to Mario Monicelli’s enormously popular I soliti ignoti (1958) that was judged by many to be almost as good as the original. The success of the film allowed Loy to make two films on the war, Un giorno da leoni (A Day for the Lionhearts, 1961) and Le quattro giornate di Napoli (The Four Days of Naples, 1962), the latter a remarkably realistic re-creation of a popular uprising staged by the people of Naples against the occupying German forces in 1943. The film was widely acclaimed, winning three Nastri d’argento as well as two Academy Award nominations, and brought a number of offers from Hollywood, which Loy declined in favor of working for Italian television and producing Specchio segreto (Secret Mirror, 1965), a program inspired by the American Candid Camera format. He nevertheless also soon returned to the big screen with the multi-episode Made in Italy (1965), a satirical look at Italian attitudes and habits, and Il padre di famiglia (The Head of the Family, 1967), a portrait of the dashed expectations of an entire generation told through the history of one particular family. He took up the theme of the war again, although in a decidedly comic vein, in Rosolino Paternò soldato (There’s No Business Like War Business, 1970) followed by a Kafkaesque voyage through the Italian judicial and penal system in Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (Why, 1971), which earned its star, Alberto Sordi, a David di Donatello for his acting and the film a nomination for the Golden Bear at Berlin. After Sistemo L’America e torno (I Fix America and Return, 1974), Loy turned again to television to make Viaggio in seconda classe (Traveling in Second Class, 1977), a program that examined recent changes in Italian society using a Candid Camera format similar to the earlier Specchio segreto. Café Express (1980), a caustic comedy celebrating the Italian propensity for making do, was followed by Mi manda Picone (Where’s Picone?, 1984), which highlighted the extensive social problems in a Naples ever more infiltrated by the camorra. Loy’s fascination with Naples, which he regarded as

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his adopted city, blossomed again in the delightful musical drama Scugnizzi (Streetkids, 1989) and in his final film, Pacco, doppio pacco e contropaccotto (Package, Double Package and Counterpackage, 1993). In the early 1990s, as well as making films and producing television programs, Loy directed a number of stage productions, including Italian versions of Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart. LUCE. See L’UNIONE CINEMATOGRAFICA EDUCATIVA (LUCE; UNION OF EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY). LUCHETTI, DANIELE (1960–). Director and screenwriter. After studying at the Gaumont Film School in Rome, where he directed “Nei dintorni di mezzanotte” (“Around Midnight”) as an episode of the group film Juke Box (1983), Luchetti worked in advertising before serving as Nanni Moretti’s assistant on Bianca (The Sweet Body of Bianca, 1984) and La messa è finita (The Mass Is Ended, 1985). In 1987, with the financial backing of Moretti’s newly formed Sacher Film company, he was able to make his directorial debut with Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow), a witty and very original historical costume drama that earned him the David di Donatello for Best New Director. After the less convincing La settimana della sfinge (The Week of the Sphinx, 1990), he directed Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), a prescient film that uncannily anticipated the revelations of systemic political corruption in Italy that emerged only a year later in the Mani pulite (Clean Hands) investigations. A further attempt to unveil political corruption and collusion in Arriva la bufera (The Storm Arrives, 1993) was followed by an affectionate, though not uncritical, portrait of the Italian educational system in La scuola (School, 1995) before another return to the past in I piccoli maestri (Little Teachers, 1998), the story of several young and idealistic intellectuals who join the Resistance movement in 1943. Following Dillo con parole mie (Ginger and Cinnamon, 2003), a light comedy of errors, Luchetti delved back into recent Italian history with Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007), a dramatic revisiting of the 1968 generation that won five Davids, two Silver Ribbons, and the Italian Golden Globe Award for Best Film. After being one of the 30 directors to contribute a section to the ensemble film All Human Rights for All (2008), Luchetti directed his ninth feature, La nostra vita (Our Life, 2010), in which a struggling construction worker and single father of three, played brilliantly by Elio Germano, descends to questionable practices and moral compromise in the hope of ensuring his family a better future. This was followed by Anni felici (Those Happy Years, 2013), a strongly autobiographical portrait of a conflicted family in the confusing 1970s, and then Chiamatemi Francesco— il papa della gente (Call Me Francesco, 2015), a respectful portrait of Pope

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Francis Bergoglio. With an altogether lighter touch, Lucchetti’s most recent offering, Io sono Tempesta (I Am Tempesta, 2018), is a tale of cleverness and complicity in which charismatic and wealthy entrepreneur Numa Tempesta, condemned to a year of social work for previous illegal business practices, nevertheless almost succeeds in carrying off the biggest deal of his life. LUCKY RED. Film distribution company. Founded in 1987 by actor, Andrea Occhipinti, who has remained its CEO to the present, Lucky Red has grown to become one of Italy’s major independent film distributors. In its three decades of activity, it has distributed some 400 films from both key Italian filmmakers like Mario Martone, Nanni Moretti, and Paolo Sorrentino and important international directors, ranging from Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke to Aki Kourismaki and Wong Kar Wai. Having long been a major distributor of Japanese anime movies in Italy, in 2009 Lucky Red became the primary Italian distributor of productions by Studio Ghibli. Over the years the company has also produced or co-produced over 40 films, including Ciprì e Maresco’s controversial Totò che visse due volte (Toto Who Lived Twice, 1998) and Gabriele Mainetti’s acclaimed debut feature, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg, 2015). Since 2000, the company has also had an exhibition arm through its major holdings in the 130-screen Circuito Cinema, thus approaching the classical model of vertical integration. In 2014, Occhipinti was personally awarded a Special David di Donatello for his contribution to Italian cinema and, in 2015, received the Prix Eurimages at the European Film Academy Awards for his company’s role in boosting European film production. In the same year, Lucky Red joined forces with independent Italian production company, Indigo Film, in launching True Colours, a new world sales company dedicated to selling both Italian and foreign films on the international market. In 2017, while celebrating the company’s 30th anniversary, Occhipinti unveiled plans to further increase the company’s involvement in the production of genre and family movies. A year later, however, the company came under attack from local exhibitors when it announced that its own produced Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi), a long-awaited film about the real-life death in custody of a young man arrested on a minor drug charge, would screen on Netflix soon after its premiere at the Venice Festival. Although able to justify the company’s unprecedented course of action, Occhipinti nevertheless stepped down from his long-held position as president of Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali (National Association of Film and Affiliated Audiovisual and Multimedia Industries) film distributors. The

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controversy itself, however, had highlighted certain shortcomings in the current regulations relating to the so-called “theatrical window,” which the government undertook to revise and reregulate with a new law. Lucky Red maintains its own internet site at http://www.luckyred.it. L’UNIONE CINEMATOGRAFICA EDUCATIVA (LUCE; UNION OF EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY). National film institute. Founded originally in 1919 as the Sindacato Istruzione Cinematografica, a trade union of documentary filmmakers, l’Unione Cinematografica Educativa was officially constituted in 1924 to coordinate the use of film for public instruction on scientific and cultural matters as well as national and international affairs. In 1925, the body was nationalized and officially renamed Istituto Nazionale LUCE. Answerable directly to Benito Mussolini, who had himself suggested the felicitous acronym, it was charged with the specific mission of spreading popular culture and disseminating information on the government’s various projects and initiatives. In 1926, a decree, later to become law, required at least one LUCE newsreel or documentary to accompany every screening of feature films in all cinemas. In addition, to overcome the scarcity of theaters in many parts of Italy, LUCE developed a fleet of “auto-cinemas” whereby vehicles outfitted with screens and projection facilities would tour country areas to bring the cinema to even the most remote towns and villages. Since LUCE newsreels and documentaries often focused on Mussolini himself and Il Duce personally scrutinized anything that was to be broadcast, the institute’s major role became ever more explicitly that of transmitting Fascist propaganda or, as film historian Gian Piero Brunetta famously put it, to construct a cinematographic monument to Mussolini himself. Nevertheless, the institute also covered other areas and included a science unit, which from 1927 was headed by the pioneer scientific documentary filmmaker Roberto Omegna. Omegna had worked for Ambrosio Film in Turin in the earliest days of Italian cinema, making numerous prize-winning documentaries, and he continued this educational activity at the LUCE until his retirement in 1942. Having made a successful transition to sound, in 1935 the institute was used by the government to establish a new state body, the Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (National Film Industry Authority). A year later, it was transferred administratively from the Head of Government’s department to the Ministry for Popular Culture, and, following the construction of Cinecittà, the institute’s headquarters were also physically relocated to the new complex. After the war, given its close affiliation with the fallen regime, LUCE was provisionally put into liquidation in 1947 but was reinstated two years later with a mission similar in many ways to its original aim—namely, providing education and instruction to the nation through films, although clearly in a

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more democratic context. After being restructured a number of times from the mid-1960s onward, in line with changes in government policies regulating the rest of the film industry, in 1982 it was merged with Italnoleggio Cinematografico, a state company for film distribution. In the 1990s, it was given greater autonomy to allow it to collaborate on projects funded by private investment. In 1998, as Istituto LUCE s.p.a., it became a subsidiary of Cinecittà Holding, a stock company controlled by the Ministry for Culture. Subsequently, in addition to its other activities, it pursued a very active and successful strategy of making available and marketing its huge store of valuable historical material. In 2011, following a further long period of structural reorganization, the Istituto LUCE and Cinecittà Holding were completely merged to form the Istituto LUCE-Cinecittà, in effect the film arm of the Ministry for Culture, with the Ministry for Finance as the sole shareholder. The full potential for synergies from such a merger came to be fully realized in 2017 when, in the wake of new legislation a year earlier offering very strong and thoroughgoing government support for the film industry, the Istituto LUCE-Cinecittà was able to reacquire the entire Cinecittà studio complex from the private consortium that had been managing the studios for the previous decade. In the same year, as provided by the new law, it assumed full management of the newly instituted GFC, the general fund for the financing of film and audiovisual production and related activities, including all aspects of film conservation, distribution, promotion, and education. As a result, at the end of the second decade of the new millennium, the Istituto LUCE-Cinecittà has effectively become the overarching state entity overseeing all production, distribution, exhibition, conservation, and promotion of cinema in Italy. Its well-maintained and bilingual website (https://cinecitta.com/EN/en/cms/140/ luce-cinecitta.aspx) has thus become the portal to all things cinematic in Italy. LUX FILM. Production company. Founded as a film distribution company in Turin in 1934 by philanthropic (and anti-Fascist) industrialist-entrepreneur Riccardo Gualino, Lux soon became one of Italy’s foremost film production companies. In the following two decades, with Gualino as president and musicologist Guido Gatti as director (joined in 1942 by a young Dino De Laurentiis), Lux produced more than 100 features by Italy’s most significant directors. The long list of films produced by Lux during its golden period includes Goffredo Alessandrini’s Don Bosco (1935), Alessandro Blasetti’s La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), Mario Camerini’s I promessi sposi (The Spirit and the Flesh, 1941), Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), Alberto Lattuada’s Senza Pietà (Without Pity, 1948), and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954).

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In the immediate postwar period, between 1945 and 1954, in addition to funding feature films, the company also employed the talents of writers and directors such as Rodolfo Sonego, Luciano Emmer, Michelangelo Antonioni, Valerio Zurlini, and Riccardo Freda to make dozens of high-quality art historical documentaries. From 1956 onward, however, with Riccardo’s son Renato now at the helm, the company reduced its activities mostly to distribution and coproduction. Then, in 1964, following the death of its founder and after almost three decades as one of the beacons of the Italian film industry, the company was wound up.

M MA L’AMOR MIO NON MUORE (LOVE EVERLASTING, 1913). Film. With the possible exception of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), Ma l’amor mio non muore undoubtedly stands as the most famous of all Italian early silent films. Directed by Mario Caserini for Gloria Film in Turin in 1913, it starred Lyda Borelli, Mario Bonnard, and Gianpaolo Rosmino. Its plot was pure romantic melodrama. In order to pay for his rich and idle lifestyle, the villainous young adventurer Moise Sthar undertakes to steal valuable military documents from the house of Colonel Julius Holbein, head of the military forces of the Grand Duchy of Wallenstein. As part of his evil plan, he courts the colonel’s beautiful daughter, Elsa, and soon declares his love to her. Her acceptance of his suit furnishes him with the opportunity to take the documents and flee. When the theft is discovered, the colonel is accused of treason and so, shamed and dishonored, he commits suicide. Suspected of complicity in the matter, Elsa is also banished from the realm. Alone and defenseless in a foreign land, she assumes a new identity and, as Diana Candouleur, embarks on a successful career as an opera singer. Having achieved great fame and fortune, she is courted by many, but the sadness that continues to afflict her leads her to fall in love with a similarly sad and wistful young man who, unbeknown to all, is actually Prince Maximilien, son of the Grand Duke, traveling incognito and tarrying in warmer climes in order to recover from a serious illness. With neither knowing the other’s true identity, the couple enjoy their idyll of love until one day the evil Sthar reappears, recognizes Elsa, and again declares his love for her. When she forcefully rejects his advances he promises to reveal all to the Grand Duke, who will undoubtedly recall the young prince and end the couple’s relationship. Distraught, Elsa returns to the stage to give one last performance but only after having drunk a poison draught. As Elsa/Diana collapses on the stage, she is caught in the arms of Maximilien, who has thrown all to the wind just to be with her forever. As she dies, outstretched beneath his loving gaze, she whispers, “Ma l’amor mio non muore” (But my love will not die).

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With its elaborate sets, elegant and high-class costumes, and relatively assured photography, in addition to its unashamedly melodramatic story line, the film topped the Italian box office in 1913. It launched the short but brilliant film career of Lyda Borelli and was instrumental in establishing her reputation as the foremost diva of the Italian screen, with her heavily stylized gestures and Pre-Raphaelite poses becoming the model for a whole generation of actresses that followed. The film’s overwhelming success and its theme of dying for love also initiated a vogue for decadent sentimental melodramas in the D’Annunzian vein that would last into the early 1920s. Indeed, in 1921, Wladimiro Apolloni directed a remake of the film for Bonnard Film but this time with children playing all the roles. The critics appreciated the performances by the young actors, who were all no older than nine, but judged the film itself as no more than an interesting curiosity. MACARIO, ERMINIO (1902–1980). Actor. Having already achieved wide renown in Italy and abroad as a comic stage actor, Macario made his film debut as a Chaplinesque innocent in Eugenio De Liguoro’s Aria di paese (Country Air, 1933). His first real success on the silver screen, however, came with the enormously popular Imputato alzatevi (Let the Accused Rise, 1939), a film directed by Mario Mattoli and widely regarded as something of a landmark in Italian screen comedy. Macario’s popularity was cemented further in subsequent slightly surreal comedies such as Non me lo dire (Don’t Tell Me, 1940) and spoofs such as Il pirata sono io! (The Pirate’s Dream, 1940) and Il fanciullo del West (The Boy from the West, 1942), a farcical early Italian Western with a Romeo and Juliet theme directed by Giorgio Ferroni. After the war, he continued to be popular in comedies such as Carlo Borghesio’s Come persi la guerra (How I Lost the War, 1948) and Come scopersi l’America (How I Discovered America, 1949), the latter undoubtedly reflecting in a comic vein the resumption of emigration to the Americas, which was taking place in Italy at the time. In the 1950s, he was more visible onstage than on-screen, but he occasionally also ventured into more dramatic territory, as in Mario Soldati’s melodrama Italia piccola (Little Italy, 1957). He subsequently appeared in a dozen other comedies, including a handful of films with Totò, but his popularity continued to decline inexorably during the 1960s as, in an Italy going through its so-called economic miracle, his more innocent brand of zany humor seemed to belong to a bygone era. See also EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION. MACCARI, RUGGERO (1919–1989). Screenwriter. After working as a journalist and editing a number of satirical magazines, Maccari began writing for films in 1948 when he collaborated on the screenplay of Giorgio Simo-

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nelli’s Undici uomini e un pallone (Eleven Men and a Ball, 1948). In the early 1950s, he cowrote and codirected four films with Mario Amendola but with rather disappointing results. He subsequently concentrated on screenwriting and contributed to many of the key films of directors such as Antonio Pietrangeli, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Zampa, Alberto Lattuada, Luigi Comencini, and Dino Risi. He formed an especially close partnership with Ettore Scola, with whom he cowrote more than a dozen films and shared the Nastro d’argento award for the screenplays of Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1965), Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), Passione d’amore (Passion of Love, 1981), and La famiglia (The Family, 1987). After having also worked extensively with Dino Risi on close to 15 films, in 1975 Maccari received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of Risi’s Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974). MACISTE. Film character. Played by the barrel-chested Bartolomeo Pagano, a Genoese dockworker with no previous acting experience, Maciste was the powerful but faithful Nubian slave who helped rescue the young Roman girl from the jaws of Moloch in Giovanni Pastrone’s silent blockbuster epic Cabiria (1914). The perceived popular appeal of the strongman character led to a long line of films in which Maciste appeared in a variety of guises and in different times and settings, playing roles as different as an Alpine trooper, an emperor, or a policeman, and yet always fundamentally the same “good giant” who had delighted audiences in the earlier film. After some 15 films for Itala Film in Italy, Pagano was enticed to make a further four Maciste films in Germany before returning to Italy to make several more for Stefano Pittaluga, including the surreal and at times hilarious Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926). While the character’s popular appeal undoubtedly derived from his uncomplicated moral values and his role as a natural defender of the weak against the bullying of the strong, many of the Itala films also demonstrated a more complex self-awareness of the medium itself on the part of the filmmakers. In the very first Maciste film (Marvelous Maciste, 1915), for example, a young girl, mistreated by an evil uncle who is attempting to appropriate her inheritance, sees Cabiria in a movie theater and decides to seek Maciste’s help. She goes to the Itala studios in Turin where Maciste is in the middle of making a new film, but he immediately responds to her plea for help and embarks with her on a quest to set things right. Fading from the screens with Pagano’s retirement and the coming of sound, although for many, now living on in the figure of Mussolini himself, the character was revived in the late 1950s in many of the sword-and-sandal epics, or so-called peplums, produced at Cinecittà. By this time, however,

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Maciste had lost his individuality and had become indistinguishable from the many Herculeses, Atlases, and other assorted neomythological strongmen, all played by a host of American bodybuilders. MAGGI, LUIGI (1867–1946). Director. Having joined Ambrosio Film as an actor in 1906, Maggi quickly graduated to being one of the studio’s most prominent and accomplished directors. His first great triumph was with Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1908), the first of what would become numerous adaptations of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel in that long line of spectacular historical epics that would constitute such a large part of early Italian silent cinema. In 1911, the historical drama Nozze d’oro (The Golden Wedding), in which he also starred alongside the rising diva Mary Cleo Talarini, was awarded first prize in the film section of the International Exhibition of Turin by a panel that included one of the Lumière brothers. Still for Ambrosio, in 1912 Maggi directed Satana—il drama dell’umanità (Satan), a four-part portrait of the prince of evil in different historical settings and manifestations, an ambitious and complex work that, although now lost, is thought to have deeply influenced both the conception and structure of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Maggi’s participation in World War I interrupted his flourishing career, and when he returned, he worked mainly as an actor. He abandoned the film industry altogether in the latter 1920s. MAGNANI, ANNA (1908–1973). Actress. The most celebrated actress of the Italian cinema in the immediate postwar period, Magnani was born illegitimately and grew up in one of the poorer quarters of Rome in the care of her maternal grandmother. An early interest in music—she studied piano at the Academy of Santa Cecilia—gave way to a stronger passion for the theater, and in 1927, she enrolled in the Eleanor Duse Acting School in Rome. Even before graduating she began working in the theater company of Dario Niccodemi and toured South America with the company in 1928. By 1930, she was becoming well known for her appearances in revues and musical theater. While continuing to work extensively on the stage, she began to play small roles in films; her first appearance was in Nunzio Malasomma’s La cieca di Sorrento (The Blind Woman of Sorrento, 1934). She subsequently played Fanny, the chanteuse, in Goffredo Alessandrini’s Cavalleria (Cavalry, 1936), a role that she repeated with slight variation in Vittorio De Sica’s Teresa Venerdì (Doctor, Beware, 1941). Forced to abandon the part of Giovanna in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) due to an advanced state of pregnancy, she then went on to play Elide in Mario Bonnard’s Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the Lady, 1943), the first of many incarnations of the forceful, down-to-earth Roman working-class woman that would character-

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ize her acting repertoire from then on. Indeed it was as a variation on this role, playing Pina, the Roman widow and mother mercilessly gunned down by German fire in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), that she would score the greatest triumph of her entire career, earning a first Nastro d’argento for her moving interpretation and being catapulted to international fame by the film’s worldwide success. She subsequently appeared in a wide variety of films that ranged from dramas such as Carmine Gallone’s Davanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, 1946) and Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946) to more lighthearted comedies such as Gennaro Righelli’s Abbassa la ricchezza (Peddlin’ in Society, 1947). Her splendid performance in Luigi Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina, 1947), again playing a Roman housewife and mother forced by circumstances to become a political agitator, earned her a second Nastro d’argento and the Volpi Cup at the Venice Festival. She then played the lead in Mario Mattoli’s remake of Assunta Spina (Scarred, 1947), a role that had originally been played by silent diva Francesca Bertini in 1915, before Rossellini devotedly showcased the full range of Magnani’s dramatic abilities in the two episodes of L’amore (Ways of Love, 1948). After a number of other films in Italy, including her very convincing and moving performance as the self-deluded mother in Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) and as the stage actress Camilla in Jean Renoir’s La carrozza d’oro (The Golden Coach, 1952), she was enticed to America to star opposite Burt Lancaster in a screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), a performance that brought her the further recognition of an Academy Award. Her reputation as an international star now established and her participation much in demand, she appeared in several other American productions, including George Cukor’s Wild Is the Wind (1958), where she starred opposite Anthony Quinn and Anthony Franciosa, and Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), where she starred with no less than Marlon Brando. However, both films were relative flops at the box office, and she returned to Italy, where, after appearing with Totò in Mario Monicelli’s bittersweet comedy Risate di gioia (The Passionate Thief, 1960), she came to play the other role for which she is most remembered, the ex-prostitute and tragic mother in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962). From this high point, Magnani’s film career rapidly declined. After an unimpressive performance in Claude Autant-Lara’s lackluster Le magot de Josefa (Josefa’s Loot, 1963), done as part of a deal between producers, she was lured back to the stage and shone in an adaptation of Giovanni Verga’s La lupa (She Wolf, 1965) and in a production in Italian of Jean Anouilh’s Medea (1966), both directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Lured once more back to the big screen, she gave a frothy performance as the wife of the drunken vintner played by Anthony Quinn in Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa

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Vittoria (1969) and then made four modest films for television directed by Alfredo Giannetti. Both poetic and appropriate, her final appearance on the big screen was a cameo where she played herself closing the door of her house and wishing Federico Fellini good night in the concluding sequence of Fellini’s Roma (1972).

Anna Magnani in Bellissima (1951), directed by Luchino Visconti. Courtesy of Photofest.

MAINETTI, GABRIELE (1976–). Actor, screenwriter, director, musician, and composer. Hailed as one of the most promising young Italian filmmakers to have emerged in the new millennium, Mainetti graduated in film history and criticism from Roma Tre University before moving to New York to study directing, cinematography, and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Returning to Italy, he undertook further studies in acting with a number of theater luminaries, including Beatrice Bracco, Francesca De Sapio, and Nikolaj Karpov. He initiated his film career in a supporting role in Carlo Vanzina’s Il cielo in una stanza (Heaven inside a Room, 1999), soon followed by appearances on national television in the RAI’s popular family series Un medico in famiglia (A Doctor in the Family, 2000) and the university student soap Stiamo bene insieme (Happy Together, 2002). While continuing to act, mostly on television, he also began to make a number of short films: Il produttore (The Producer, 2004), L’ultima spiaggia

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(In the Fridge for Love, 2005), Basette (Sideburns, 2006), and Love in Central Park (2010). In 2012, Tiger Boy, a short film in which a nine-year-old boy creates a tiger mask that he then wears obsessively as a way of coping with the sexual abuse to which he is being subjected by a pedophile teacher, won a score of prizes on the international festival circuit and, in Italy, was nominated for the David di Donatello for Best Short Film, with Mainettti himself also winning the Nastro d’argento as Best Short Film Director. The film also made the short list of nominations for the Academy Awards in the Live Action Short Film section. Having by this time founded his own production company, Goon Films, in 2015 he proceeded, together with screenwriter Nicola Guaglianone, with whom he had established a close working relationship since Il produttore, to make one of the most impressive debuts in recent Italian film history with his first feature, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg). The story of a misanthropic Roman petty criminal who unexpectedly gains superhuman powers after jumping into the Tiber River while fleeing police, and eventually utilizing his powers to save the city of Rome from the destructive intentions of the evil Gypsy, the film was universally hailed as a unique triumph of adventurous filmmaking and showered with numerous awards, significantly winning seven of its 16 David di Donatello nominations and five of its nine nominations for the Nastro d’argento, including the Nastro for Best Emerging Director. While undoubtedly meditating a second feature, Mainetti returned to short filmmaking with Ningyo (2016), a nine-minute modular film that could be assembled in six different versions, commissioned by the Renault Company to exemplify the innovative modularity of its new Scenic range. The short received a warm reception when presented at the Venice Festival. In 2018, Mainetti announced the beginning of filming for his second feature film, Freaks out (2018), apparently a continuation of the spirit and style of, but in no way a sequel to, Jeeg. The film is presently reported to be in postproduction. MANETTI BROS (MARCO [1968–]; ANTONIO [1970–]). Directors and screenwriters. One of the most dynamic duos currently working in the Italian film industry, the Manetti brothers made their directorial debut with “Consegna a domicilio” (“Home Delivery”), one of 10 unconnected episodes of the largely tongue-in-cheek ensemble horror anthology DeGenerazione (DeGeneration, 1994). In 1997, their small-budget made-for-television Torino Boys, set completely within the Nigerian immigrant community in Italy of the time and using nonprofessional actors from that community, received the Special Mention at the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema. Three years later, supported by established actor-director Carlo Verdone, they were able to finance their first full feature, Zora la vampira (Zora the Vam-

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pire, 2000), a horror-comedy with rap music loosely riffing on the wellknown Dracula story. After producing several MTV music videos, in 2005 they directed their second feature, Piano 17 (The 17th Floor, 2005). A taut and engrossing comic crime thriller set almost completely within the elevator of a multistory office block, it was nominated for the David di Donatello for its visual effects and the Nastro d’argento for its musical score. The brothers subsequently returned to television, directing the first of what would become seven seasons of the popular RAI comic police series L’ispettore Coliandro (2006–2018) and three episodes of the noir series Crimini (Crimes, 2006–2007). Having acquired a reputation as master practitioners of genre, in 2009 they were invited to mentor a class of students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in producing the gory slasher film Cavie (Human Test, 2009). Two years later, they wrote and directed their third feature, L’arrivo di Wang (The Arrival of Wang, 2011), an extremely effective small-budget science fiction thriller created as something of an ironic counter to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982). A year later, the brothers embraced the emerging 3D technology to make Paura 3D (Fear, 2012), a classic horror film in which three youngsters break into the villa of a nobleman and discover something they shouldn’t in the basement. After having long been held at arm’s length as mere genre filmmakers, in 2014 they achieved a significant critical triumph with Song’e Napule (Song of Napoli, 2013), a comic Mafia musical thriller that received six Nastro d’argento nominations, in the event winning Best Film, Best Song, Best Score, and Best Supporting Actor, as well as Davids for Best Music and Best Song. They then turned again to television, directing 23 episodes of the fifth season of L’ispettore Rex (Inspector Rex, 2014–2015) but returned to the big screen to score their greatest critical success to date with Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets, 2015). Winning nine of its 15 David nominations and six of its nine nominations for the Nastro d’argento, it was also awarded the Italian Golden Globe for Best Comedy with the entire cast also receiving the Pasinetti Award at Venice. Flushed with success, they nevertheless returned to television to direct another dozen episodes of the Inspector Coliandro series (2016–2017) before announcing that their next feature will be a remake of Mario Bava’s 1969 cult classic Diabolik. MANFREDI, NINO (1921–2004). Actor and director. An extremely popular actor who appeared in more than 100 films in a career that spanned the entire postwar period, Nino (short for Saturnino) Manfredi graduated in law while also studying at the Rome Academy of Dramatic Art. A born, and very versatile, entertainer, he was soon appearing onstage with some of the most prestigious theatrical companies as well as creating comic characters on the radio and dubbing films, including being the voice of Marcello Mastroianni in Luciano Emmer’s Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris Is Always Paris, 1951)

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and Le ragazze di piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952). His first film appearance was in the otherwise undistinguished Monastero di Santa Chiara (Monastery of Saint Clare, 1949). Continuing to work in revues and musical theater, he played supporting roles in a handful of other minor films while also beginning to achieve a solid popularity through his appearances on national television.

Nino Manfredi (center) in Franco Brusati’s Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973). Courtesy of Photofest.

Following more significant roles in comedies such as Guardia, ladro e cameriera (Maid, Thief and Guard, 1958) and Nanni Loy’s Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco in Milan, 1959), Manfredi’s film career blossomed during the 1960s when he became one of the regular and much-loved faces in many of the films of the commedia all’italiana. His multiple characters in Lina Wertmüller’s caustic satire of Italian masculinity Questa volta parliamo di uomini (This Time Let’s Talk about Men, 1965) brought him his first Nastro d’argento, which was soon followed by a second for his role in Luigi Magni’s Nell’anno del signore (The Conspirators, 1969). His greatest cinematic triumphs, however, came in the 1970s with his portrayal of Geppetto in Luigi Comencini’s much-loved made-for-television Pinocchio (1972, released in a theatrical version in the same year), his interpretation of the hapless Italian immigrant in Switzerland in Franco Brusati’s Pane e cioc-

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colata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973), and his most endearing performance as Antonio in Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974). Having already tried his hand at directing with an episode of the compilation film L’amore difficile (Of Wayward Love, 1963), in 1971 he also cowrote and directed himself in Per grazia ricevuta (Between Miracles, 1971), an irreverent satire on religion that earned him a nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes, a David di Donatello for his direction, and two Nastri d’argento for Best Story and Best Screenplay. His popularity continued unabated throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when, alongside a host of successful films for the big screen, he starred in a number of extremely popular television miniseries including Un commissario a Roma (Police Commissioner in Rome, 1993) and the even longer-running Linda e il brigadiere (Linda and the Police Sergeant, 1997–1999). His last appearance on the big screen was in La luz prodigiosa (The End of a Mystery, 2003), a Spanish production directed by Miguel Hermoso where Manfredi plays an old man who may, or may not, be an aged Federico Garcia Lorca who has lived on in Granada for another half century after having miraculously escaped execution during the Spanish Civil War. MANGANO, SILVANA (1930–1989). Actress. One of the first of the socalled maggiorate, or generously proportioned starlets of Italian postwar cinema, Mangano (Miss Rome, 1946) had been a model and had played small supporting parts in a number of minor films before skyrocketing to international stardom as the feisty, black-stockinged rice worker in Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). In the same year she married producer Dino De Laurentiis in a civil ceremony and subsequently had four children with him before seeking a legal separation in 1983. (Their son Federico died in a plane accident in 1981.) Although De Laurentiis sought to exploit Mangano’s strongly erotic image in the early 1950s in films such as Alberto Lattuada’s Anna (1951), in which she played a troubled nightclub singer who eventually becomes a nun, and Mario Camerini’s Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), in which she played both Circe and Penelope, Mangano would earn a much more exalted and enduring reputation for the ethereal, almost abstract, femininity that she came to exemplify in the mother figures she played in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) and Teorema (Theorem, 1968) and Luchino Visconti’s Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), Ludwig (1973), and Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974). Always more interested in her family than in international stardom, she chose her roles very carefully in the latter part of her career and drastically reduced her screen appearances to a minimum. Her last role was as Elisa, the wife of Romano (played by her

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friend Marcello Mastroianni), in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oci ciornie (Dark Eyes, 1987), following which she retired to battle a long, and eventually terminal, illness.

Silvana Mangano in Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). Courtesy of Photofest.

MANNINO, FRANCO (1924–2005). Composer, pianist, conductor, opera director, music teacher, novelist, and playwright. A prolific and wide-ranging composer who published more than 500 musical works during his lifetime, Mannino also scored or arranged the music for a host of films. He initiated his association with the cinema by composing the music for Léonide Moguy’s Domani è un altro giorno (Tomorrow Is Another Day, 1951). He then worked extensively with Luchino Visconti, scoring or arranging the music for Bellissima (1951), Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), Ludwig (1973), Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974), and L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976), the last being awarded the David di Donatello for Best Musical Score. At the same time, he also composed the music for Carlo Lizzani’s Ai margini della metropoli (At the Edge of the City, 1953), Mario Soldati’s La provinciale (The Wayward Wife, 1953), John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953, known in Italy as Il tesoro dell’Africa), and Luigi Zampa’s La romana (Woman of Rome, 1954). Beginning in the mid1950s, he also collaborated with directors of the more popular genres such as

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Antonio Margheriti and Riccardo Freda, for whom he scored I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire, 1957), the film that initiated the Italian horror genre. Mannino’s last credited film score was in fact for Freda’s L’ossessione che uccide (Murder Syndrome, 1981). MARAZZI, ALINA (1964–). Writer and director. Widely recognized as one of the leading members of the current generation of Italian female filmmakers working at the intersection of fiction and documentary, Milanese-born Marazzi undertook her education in film and video in London in the mid1980s. After graduating with honors in film and television from the London College of Printing, she returned to Italy and began making short- and mediumlength documentaries on social themes. Her L’America me l’immaginavo (I Imagined America, 1991), recording the memories of the wives of fishermen from the Sicilian island of Marettimo who had emigrated to California at the beginning of the century, was awarded first prize at the Garda Film Festival. After producing Ragazzi dentro (Boys on the Inside, 1997), a two-part series made for the national broadcaster, RAI, on life in youth prisons in Italy seen from the point of view of the young inmates themselves, and Il sogno tradito (The Betrayed Dream, 1999), another made-for-television documentary on the lives of street kids in postcommunist Romania, she began working as assistant to a number of directors, including with Giuseppe Piccioni on Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World, 1999) and Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes, 2001) and Paolo Rosa on Il mnemonista (The Mnemonist, 2000). Having also collaborated on art installations with Studio Azzurro and the Benetton School, Fabrica, she made her first feature documentary, Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour with You, 2002), a remarkably engaging personal documentary that interlaced footage from family home movies, photos, diaries, drawings, letters, and clinical reports to effectively reconstruct the life of a mother Marazzi had only known briefly and who, after lengthy periods of hospitalization with mental issues, had committed suicide when her daughter was seven years old. Truly innovative in its technique of filmic “gleaning,” as feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey would characterize it, Marazzi’s groundbreaking documentary won the prize of the City of Turin at the Turin Film Festival and a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary. Committed to exploring and recording the experience of women, her next full-length documentary, Per sempre (Forever, 2005), attempted to bring to light the motives and circumstances leading some women to choose the cloistered life of a religious order. Two years later in Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007), Marazzi reprised her earlier technique of operating a creative montage across a host of heterogenous textual and audiovisual materials, including personal diaries, historical found footage, newspaper reports, television spots, photoromances, animation, and purposely shot se-

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quences in order to provide a picture of how Italian women’s lives and notions of identity had changed radically in the 1960s and 1970s. Both a significant contribution to the history of the women’s movement in Italy and a thoroughly entertaining film, it was nominated for the David di Donatello Best Documentary Award. Made six years later, Marazzi’s first fictional feature, Tutto parla di te (All about You, 2013), continued to explore the depths of women’s experience. Originally titled Baby Blues, and starring veteran English actress Charlotte Rampling, it attempted to throw light on the profound ambivalence of motherhood and, in particular, on the seldom-discussed experience of postpartum depression and child rejection. In 2014, she participated in the Istituto LUCE’s project 9x10 novanta, which challenged filmmakers to create a short film from stock footage held in the institution’s archives, with her segment “Confini” (“Borders”), in which she coupled the historical images of soldiers digging trenches during the First World War with the poetry of Mariangela Gualtieri. Two years later, Marazzi returned to feature-length documentary with Anna Piaggi, una visionaria della moda (Anna Piaggi, a Visionary of Fashion, 2016), which reconstructed, again through a creative assemblage of textual and audiovisual materials, the life and the contribution to Italian culture of the legendary Italian fashion journalist. MARCELLO, PIETRO (1976–). Writer and director. One of the most impressive members of the new generation of determinedly independent Italian filmmakers that has come to the fore in the new millennium, Marcello began studying painting at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts but soon abandoned academic studies in order to work as a volunteer film promoter and programmer at the Diego Armando Maradona Montesanto Community Center in Naples. With a passionate love of cinema but no formal training in filmmaking, he began with a number of friends to make short social documentaries; his 35-minute Il cantiere (The Construction Site) won first prize at the prestigious Libero Bizzarri Documentary Film Festival in 2004. Three years later, his first feature-length work, Il passaggio della linea (Crossing the Line, 2007), a devoted documentation of encounters on the fleet of antiquated express trains crossing the Italian peninsula at night, filmed entirely on the moving trains, attracted high praise when screened at the Venice Festival that year and was subsequently nominated for the David di Donatello for Best Documentary. His second feature, La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 2009), the story of a hard-nosed ex-convict and his transsexual lover set against the backdrop of an industrial port of Genoa now in sad decline, was awarded, among a plethora of international prizes, both the David and the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary. This was followed by Il silenzio di Pelešjan (The Silence of Pelešjan, 2011), a moving tribute to the unjustly forgotten Armenian director Artavazd Pelešjan, before the film that

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many regard as Marcello’s greatest achievement to date, Bella e perduta (Lost and Beautiful, 2015). An unusual blend of social documentary and mythopoeic fable, the film succeeds in paying homage to a heroic farmer who for years, single-handedly and at his own expense, defended the splendid but abandoned regal mansion of Carditello in the Neapolitan countryside from the depredations of thieves and vandals, while also voicing an elegiac lament for a lost Italy. In something of a new direction, Marcello has adapted a novel by Jack London in his most recent feature, Martin Eden (2019). MARESCO, FRANCO (1958–). Director and screenwriter. As a cinephile managing a video rental store in his native Palermo (Sicily), Maresco took the first steps in his filmmaking career in the mid-1980s when he teamed up with fellow aspiring Sicilian filmmaker Daniele Ciprì to begin making shorts and documentaries for one of the local private television stations. Their work gradually began to gain wider attention, and in the wake of their short Seicortosei (1991) winning the Golden Seagull at the Bellaria Film Festival, they were invited to be regulars on the RAI national television’s Blob and Dopo orari late-night film programs. It was there that the anarchic and surreal short films that they presented under the rubric of Cinico TV came to attract a cult audience. Their provocative, seemingly spontaneous interactive interviews with odd (and always male) characters of their native Palermo, played by nonprofessional actors and filmed in high-contrast black and white against usually desolate and dilapidated urban landscapes, soon came to be widely appreciated as fragments of a profoundly creative auteur cinema and earned the duo a national reputation as innovative filmmakers. By 1995, their growing notoriety allowed them to finance their first feature, Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn, 1995). Very much in the style of their Cinico TV, and utilizing many of the same characters and motifs, the film presented a desolate but entrancing picture of Palermo as a postapocalyptic urban and moral wasteland, its fragmented narrative of a family of males obliged by two dwarves to hide a mysterious uncle from America a clear allusion to the Mafia wars that were continuing to devastate the city. Despite, or perhaps on account of, its visionary nihilism, brilliantly conveyed by Luca Bigazzi’s high-contrast black-and-while photography, the film won the Casa Rossa Prize at the Bellaria Festival, and Ciprì and Maresco were nominated for the Nastro d’argento as Best Emerging Directors. Three years later, they were able to direct their second feature, Totò che visse due volte (Toto Who Lived Twice, 1998). Also created in the provocative and iconoclastic style of Cinico TV, the film screened without incident at the Berlin International Film Festival, but its planned theatrical release in Italy was blocked by the censors on charges of religious blasphemy and offense to public morals. The film’s distributor, Lucky Red, mounted a strong legal challenge, and the film was eventually given a theatrical release but only for

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over 18. Ironically, as well as creating greater publicity for the film, the censor’s intervention only served to hasten the abolition of the censorship system altogether. Undeterred, the duo also continued to nurture a parallel love of jazz music with a number of documentaries, including Steve plays Duke (1999), a portrait of jazz pianist Steve Lacy, and Miles Gloriosus (2001), a celebration of legendary trumpeter Miles Davis. Moving slightly more toward the mainstream, Ciprì and Maresco’s third feature, Il ritorno di Cagliosto (The Return of Cagliostro, 2003), was a hilarious tongue-in-cheek story about two brothers attempting (and failing) in the immediate postwar period to single-handedly revive the ancient glories of the Sicilian film industry. This was followed by a full-length documentary on the famous comic duo Ciccio Ingrassia and Franco Franchi, titled Come inguaiammo il cinema italiano—la vera storia di Franco e Ciccio (How We Got the Italian Movie Business into Trouble: The True Story of Franco and Ciccio, 2004). After two further television series in the style of Cinico TV, I migliori nani della nostra vita (2006, six episodes) and Ai confini della pietà (At the Limits of Pity, 2007, six episodes) and a number of other documentaries, including Il testamento di Monicelli (Monicelli’s Will, 2010), the pair amicably separated in order to pursue their individual interests. Immediately following the break, Maresco returned to his great love of jazz, writing and directing the two-hour Io sono Tony Scott ovvero come l’Italia fece fuori il più grande clarinettista del jazz (I’m Tony Scott or How Italy Wiped Out the Greatest Clarinet Player in the History of Jazz, 2010), a moving homage to the Italian American jazz musician who, after achieving legendary status in America, had in the mid-1970s settled in Italy but whose death in 2007, in confirmation of the truth of the film’s title, had passed virtually unnoticed. As further confirmation, although screened at the Locarno Film Festival and broadcast several times on RAI national television, the film itself never received a theatrical release. Four years later, Maresco was able to release his second feature, Belluscone, una storia siciliana (Belluscone: A Sicilian Story, 2014), a mockumentary ostensibly recording the continual interruption and ultimate failure of its director, Maresco himself, to complete his projected film on the connections between the Sicilian Mafia and several-times Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, which, in the process, nevertheless succeeds in highlighting them. By contrast with Maresco’s previous film, Belluscone was very warmly received at the Venice Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize in the Horizons section and, in 2015, was awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary. A year later, Gli uomini di questa città io non li conosco (The Men of This City I Don’t Recognize, 2015) was Maresco’s full-length documentary and homage to the life and work of Sicilian playwright and actor Franco Scaldati. Maresco’s

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most recent feature, La mafia non è più quella di una volta (The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be, 2019), is, again, a documentary with an oblique take on what would seem to be Sicily’s ineradicable, if changing, scourge. MARGADONNA, ETTORE MARIA (1893–1975). Writer, journalist, and screenwriter. After successfully pursuing a career in journalism and publishing one of the earliest Italian histories of the cinema, Margadonna turned to screenwriting in the late 1930s, working with many of the most significant directors of the interwar period, including Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Bonnard, Gennaro Righelli, Mario Soldati, and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. In the immediate postwar period, he collaborated with Alberto Lattuada on Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946) and with Renato Castellani on both Sotto il sole di Roma (Beneath a Roman Sun, 1948) and Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents’ Worth of Hope, 1952), the subject for the last film earning him a Nastro d’argento. In 1950, he published an anthology of short stories and, two years later, also provided a creditable performance as Ivan’s uncle in Federico Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952). His greatest triumph, however, came in 1953 when he wrote the story and screenplay for Luigi Comencini’s enormously popular Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), which brought him a nomination for the Academy Award. He subsequently provided the story and screenplay for both the sequels, Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky) and Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorento, 1955), and worked on another half dozen minor films before retiring from films altogether in the early 1960s. His last contribution to Italian cinema was the treatment for Il monaco di Monza (The Monk of Monza, 1963), one of the films starring Totò, directed by Sergio Corbucci. MARGHERITI, ANTONIO (1930–2002). Screenwriter and director. One of the masters of Italian (and international) low-budget B-grade films, Margheriti worked in, and across, all the major genres, producing more than 50 films in a career that spanned almost a half century. After working mostly as a screenwriter in the early 1950s, Margheriti made his directorial debut with Spacemen (also known as Assignment Outer Space, 1960), one of the first exemplars of Italian science fiction. Thereafter, usually under the pseudonym Anthony M. Dawson, Margheriti dabbled freely in all the genres, making more apocalyptic science fiction fantasies like Il pianeta degli uomini spenti (The Battle of the Worlds, 1961) and I diafanoidi vengono da Marte (The War of the Planets, 1966), sword-and-sandal epics like Il crollo di Roma (The Fall of Rome, 1963) and Ursus, il terrore dei kirghisi (Hercules, Prisoner of Evil, 1964), Spaghetti Westerns such as Joko invoca Dio . . . e muori (Vengeance, 1968), and parodic spy thrillers in

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the James Bond mold: Operazione Goldman (Lightning Bolt, 1966) and A007, sfida ai killers (Agent 007 Challenges the Killers, 1966, also known internationally as Bob Flemming, Mission Casablanca). He achieved a strong international reputation, particularly in the horror genre, with films such as La vergine di Norimberga (Horror Castle, 1963), Danza macabra (Castle of Blood, 1964), Apocalypse domani (Cannibals in the Streets, 1980), and the two films he codirected with American director Paul Morrissey, Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974). He also had a special propensity for creating hybrid genres such as the bizarre supernatural Western Whisky & Fantasmi (Whiskey and Ghosts, 1974), where a young man on the run from Mexican bandits is protected by the ghosts of Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, and Johnny Appleseed. Appropriately, his last film, Virtual Weapon (1997, also known as Cyberflic), filmed entirely in Miami, Florida, and made under his usual pseudonym of Anthony Dawson, was a blend of police thriller, buddy movie, and dystopic science fiction. MARINELLI, LUCA (1984–). Actor. Son of actor and dubber Eugenio Nicola Marinelli, Luca Marinelli nurtured a passion for acting from his teens. Having applied to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia but refused entry because he was under age, he took his father’s advice and attended acting classes with Guillarmo Glanc. In 2006, he was able to enrol in Rome’s Silvio D’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art and even before graduating in 2009 had appeared in a dozen professional stage productions. His performance onstage came to be noticed by director Saverio Costanzo, who offered him the difficult male lead in La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2010), playing opposite Alba Rohrwacher. He subsequently gave a very convincing performance as the transvestite Roberta in Gian Alfonso Pacinotti’s L’ultimo terrestre (The Last Man on Earth, 2011), the adaptation of a graphic novel about an alien invasion of the Earth, and played the role of Joseph in Giacomo Campiotti’s telemovie Maria di Nazaret (Mary of Nazareth, 2012) before starring in Paolo Virzì’s Tutti i santi giorni (Every Blessed Day, 2012), for which he received Best Actor nominations for both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento. A year later, Paolo Sorrentino had him play the minor, but significant, role of Andrea in his Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013). In the same year, he received the prestigious European Film Shooting Star Award as one of the most promising up-and-coming actors on the European scene. In 2015, he was able to give ample proof of fulfilment of promise playing both the wayward Cesare in Claudio Caligari’s Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad, 2015), a brilliant performance that earned him the Pasinetti Award at Venice, and the over-the-top Joker-like

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villain, Zingaro (Gypsy), in Gabriele Mainetti’s Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg, 2015), which saw him receive all three awards—the David, Nastro d’argento, and Golden Ciak—for Best Supporting Actor. After a supporting role in Andrea Molaioli’s Slam—tutto per una ragazza (Slam, 2016) and a moving performance as the gay young man who in the end becomes a father in Fabio Mollo’s Il padre d’Italia (There Is A Light: Il padre d’Italia, 2017), he provided a thoroughly convincing impersonation of the legendary singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André in Luca Facchini’s twopart television biopic Fabrizio De André—Principe Libero (2018). At the same time, he also took on the role of the ruthless young mafioso Primo in Trust (2018), an American 10-episode TV series recounting the kidnapping in Italy of J. Paul Getty, directed by, among others, Danny Boyle. A year later, even as he was receiving the Volpi Cup at the Venice Festival for his masterful performance in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019), press reports suggested that he would be playing the lead in the Manetti Bros’ longawaited remake of Mario Bava’s cult classic Diabolik. MARRA, VINCENZO (1972–). Screenwriter and director. One of the most promising of the younger generation of Italian filmmakers who came to the fore in the new millenium, Marra studied law and worked as a sports photographer before beginning to make short films in 1998. After working as assistant to Mario Martone on Teatri di guerra (Rehearsals for War, 1998), and with Chilean Italian director Marco Bechis on Garage Olimpo (1999), a film that highlighted the use of torture during the Argentinian regime, Marra directed his own first feature, Tornando a casa (Sailing Home, 2001). A complex drama about Neapolitan fishermen forced by necessity into illegal activities, the film was screened to great acclaim at a host of festivals, including Venice, where it was awarded the first prize for a debut feature. There followed the feature-length documentary Estanei alla massa (Separate from the Rest, 2002), which closely observed the daily lives of seven fanatical Neapolitan soccer fans, and a shorter documentary on Sicily, Paesaggio a sud (Southern Landscape, 2003), before Marra’s similarly acclaimed second feature, Vento di terra (Land Wind, 2004). The moving but unsentimental story of a young Neapolitan man who becomes ill through exposure to depleted uranium while on voluntary military service in Kosovo, the film won both the International Film Critics Prize and the Pasinetti Award for most innovative film. Turning to documentary again, Marra recorded a major trial of members of the camorra in Naples in L’udienza è aperta (The Session Is Open, 2006) before his third feature, L’ora di punta (Rush Hour, 2007). A poor critical reception to the latter prompted a return to documentary filmmaking with Il grande progetto (The Grand Project, 2008), recording the

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stages of a large-scale project of urban renewal in the formerly industrial Neapolitan quarter of Bagnoli and Il gemello (The Twin, 2012), documenting the life of two young men in the high-security prison of Secondigliano. After contributing to an ensemble project to memorialize the history of the city in Bridges of Sarajevo (2014), he returned to fiction with La prima luce (First Light, 2015), the story of a young father who will go literally to the ends of the earth in order to be with his son, who has been taken from him by his mother and now estranged partner. Marra’s most recent film, L’equilibrio (Equilibrium, 2017) explores the moral quandaries of a Catholic priest forced to come to terms with the power of the local Mafia. MARTELLI, OTELLO (1902–2000). Cinematographer. Martelli began working as a cameraman at Caesar Film in 1916 and graduated to director of photography on a number of films directed by Roberto Roberti before joining the Istituto LUCE in the mid-1920s. In 1928, he followed and recorded Umberto Nobile’s ill-fated flight to the North Pole in his feature-length documentary Eroiche gesta dell’Artide (Exploits in the Arctic Region, 1928). On his return, he joined the newly revived Cines, where he worked as cinematographer on a host of films that included Alessandro Blasetti’s Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1935), Mario Camerini’s Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935), and the first film to star comic actor Totò, Fermo con le mani (Hands Off Me!, 1937), directed by Gero Zambuto. After the war, he collaborated with Roberto Rossellini on Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, 1949), and Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950); on many of Giuseppe De Santis’s films, including the extremely successful Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949); and with Federico Fellini on I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (The Swindlers, 1955), Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957), and La dolce vita (1960). Although not unduly enthusiastic about color, he photographed Vittorio De Sica’s La riffa (The Raffle), Fellini’s Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Doctor Antonio), and two episodes of Boccaccio ’70 (1962), as well as Abel Gance’s final film, Cyrano et D’Artagnan (Cyrano and D’Artagnan, 1964), before retiring from the industry in 1966. MARTOGLIO, NINO (1870–1921). Journalist, poet, playwright, and film director. Already a prolific and highly renowned poet, playwright, and theater director, Martoglio also came to earn an honored place in the history of early Italian cinema by directing three films for the short-lived Morgana Film company, which he had helped found in Sicily: Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark, 1914), Capitan Blanco (1914), and Teresa Raquin (1915). The meticulously realistic sets and the naturalistic acting in these films were in very

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strong contrast to the artificial scenography and the more stylized acting in the historical superspectacles and costume dramas that were monopolizing so much Italian film production at the time. This has prompted many to see Martoglio’s films as distant forebears of Neorealism. Indeed, the only known existing copy of Sperduti nel buio continued to be used for teaching at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia as a consummate example of cinematic realism until 1943, when it was lost while being transported to Germany. MARTONE, MARIO (1959–). Actor, screenwriter, and film and theater writer and director. Martone began acting onstage in 1976. Two years later, he founded the experimental theater group Falso Movimento (False Movement), with which he staged a long series of critically acclaimed theatrical spectacles, the most renowned of which was Tango glaciale (Glacial Tango, 1982). While continuing to work in live theater, Martone began experimenting with video art and, in 1984, made his first short film, Nella citta barocca (In the Baroque City, 1984), a lyrical documentary on his native Naples in the 17th-century. His first full-length feature, Morte di un matematico napolitano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, 1992), recounting the last days of internationally renowned Neapolitan mathematician Renato Caccioppoli before he committed suicide in 1959, was immediately hailed as a brilliant first work, winning the Special Grand Jury Prize at Venice, as well as a Nastro d’argento and a David di Donatello for Best New Director. Following the medium-length Rasoi (Razors, 1993), a series of reflections on Naples, and the documentary Lucio Amelio-Terrae Motus (1993), Martone directed his second feature, Amore molesto (Nasty Love, 1995), a dark, erotic thriller adapted from an early novel by Elena Ferrante, which was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and brought him another David di Donatello for Best Director. After Una storia sahawari (A Story of the Sahawari, 1996), a short documentary made for television focusing on the plight of children living in a North African refugee camp, he directed “La salita” (“The Climb”), one episode of the ensemble film I vesuviani (1997), made in collaboration with four other young Neapolitan directors. A year later, Teatro di guerra (Rehearsals for War, 1998) was built around the preparation of a theatrical production of Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes but provocatively set against the backdrop of war in Sarajevo. After having been drawn away from cinema by his appointment as artistic director of the Theater of Rome in 1999, Martone returned to the big screen with L’odore del sangue (The Smell of the Blood, 2004), another dark, erotic work adapted from a novel by Goffredo Parise. Six years later, he revisited the political struggles of the Risorgimento in Noi credevamo (We Believed, 2010), a meticulous historical re-creation and reinterpretation of the nationalistic movement that was

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nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice and was subsequently awarded seven Davids and the Nastro d’argento for the year. After having returned to the theater in 2011 to stage an acclaimed adaptation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali (Small Moral Works), Martone directed Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi, 2014), a moving portrait of the troubled short life of the 19thcentury poet and thinker. Starring Elio Germano in a compelling performance that earned him the David di Donatello for Best Actor, the film won the Golden Ciak and the Nastro d’argento for Best Film of the Year. Four years later, after a great deal of historical research and theater work, Martone wrote and directed Capri-Revolution (2018), a film about a commune of revolutionaries and freethinking artists established on the Isle of Capri in the period immediately preceding the First World War. Anticipated by a stage production at the NEST theater in Naples, Martone’s most recent film is a updated screen version of Eduardo De Filippo’s 1961 play, Il sindaco del Rione Sanità (The Mayor of Rione Sanità, 2019). Even before the film had premiered at the Venice Festival, Martone had already returned to his other love, the lyric theater, to present his new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff at Rome’s Teatro Ettore Scola. MASELLI, FRANCESCO (1930–). Director and screenwriter. During a career spanning seven decades, Maselli has remained one of the most politically vocal and socially committed of all Italian directors. After taking part in the Resistance movement during World War II, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, from which he graduated in 1949. At the same time, he served as assistant on some of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early documentaries and made a number of his own, which were shown to strong acclaim at the Venice Festival. He subsequently worked as codirector with Cesare Zavattini on “La storia di Caterina” (“Caterina’s Story”), one of the six episodes of the compilation film Amore in Città (Love in the City, 1953). He would collaborate again with Zavattini in the early 1960s, when he would contribute the episode “Le adolescenti e l’amore” (The Adolescents and Love) to Zavattini’s Le italiane e l’amore (Latin Lovers, 1961). His first feature, Gli sbandati (Abandoned, 1955), examined the issue of political responsibility among the younger generation at the time of the events of 1943. After a number of minor works, including I Bambini al cinema (Children at the Cinema, 1957), a delightful short film about a small cinema for children in Rome’s Villa Borghese, he made I delfini (Silver Spoon Set, 1960), a scathing portrait of the bored and wealthy younger generation in a provincial city at the beginning of Italy’s economic boom. This was followed by a finely crafted adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Gli indifferenti (A Time of Indifference, 1964), superbly photographed in black and white by master cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo. Maselli played an active part in the protests of 1968 including the occupation and boycott of the

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Venice Festival that year; he then made Lettera aperta a un giornale della sera (Open Letter to an Evening Daily, 1970), a highly polemical and provocative film shot on 16 mm film in cinema verité style. This was followed by Il sospetto (The Suspect, 1975), a taut and highly charged political thriller set in the mid-1930s, written with Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas and starring Gian Maria Volonté in what was perhaps one of his finest performances. For the next decade, Maselli largely produced films made for television, among them Avventura di un fotografo (The Adventure of a Photographer, 1984), which he adapted from a short story by Italo Calvino. He returned to the big screen with Storia d’amore (A Tale of Love, 1986), a penetrating psychological study of female breakdown that earned the film the Grand Jury Prize at Venice as well as the Volpi Cup for the film’s lead actress, Valeria Golino. As an active member of the Communist Refoundation Party and president of the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (National Film Writers’ Association), Maselli organized a number of directors to film the antiglobalization demonstrations at the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2001. His subsequent works have for the most part been socially conscious documentaries, from Lettere dalla Palestina (Letters from Palestine, 2002) and Firenze, nostro domani (Florence, Our Tomorrow, 2003) to Civico Zero (Civics Zero, 2007), an intense close-up look at the lives of three homeless individuals in Rome and Verona, which received a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary. His last feature, Ombre Rosse (The Red Shadows, 2009), set in a community center created by activists occupying an abandoned cinema in Rome, was something of an essay film carrying out a didactic critique of economic liberalism and globalization. Two years later, “Sciaccali” (Hyenas) was his contribution to the ensemble film Scossa, which was made to commemorate the 1908 earthquake and the ensuing tidal wave in Sicily that left more than 100,000 dead in its wake. MASINA, GIULIETTA (1921–1994). Actress. An accomplished and versatile actress who appeared in some 30 films in a career that spanned five decades, Masina is nevertheless probably most remembered for the roles she played in the films of her husband, Federico Fellini. After achieving some popularity on the radio in the early 1940s as the main female character in a comic program written by the then unknown Fellini, Masina made her screen debut in Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948) in a strong supporting role that earned her the Nastro d’argento. Two years later, she received her second Silver Ribbon for her performance as Melina Amour, the plainer variety actress abandoned by her man for the more beautiful Carla Del Poggio in Lattuada and Fellini’s Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950). Following a minor role in Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (The Greatest Love, 1952) and a fleeting appearance as a prostitute named Cabiria in Felli-

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ni’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952), she came to international prominence as the endearing waif Gelsomina in Fellini’s La strada (1954), with the film winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and Masina being nominated for the BAFTA award for Best Actress. Three years later, her captivating performance as the warmhearted prostitute in Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) brought her a third Nastro d’argento as well as the Best Actress prize at Cannes. In the following years, she appeared in a number of films by other directors, including alongside Anna Magnani in Renato Castellani’s hard-edged female prison drama Nella città l’inferno (. . . and the Wild, Wild Women, 1959), as Rita Pavone’s mother in Lina Wertmüller’s Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito, 1967), and as the self-sacrificing solo mother in the RAI four-part miniseries Camilla (1974), but her most memorable subsequent performances were undoubtedly those Fellini elicited from her in Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965) and then in the swan song of Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986). Her final appearance on the big screen was as Bertille, a 70-year-old mother attempting to bring her family together for a last meal, in Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s Aujourd’hui peut-être (A Day to Remember, 1991). MASTRANDREA, VALERIO (1972–). Actor, producer, screenwriter, and director. By his own account, Mastrandrea’s first steps toward becoming one of the leading actors of his generation were not through any formal study or training but rather via chance appearances in his late teens on the popular Maurizio Costanzo television talk-show. In his early 20s, he began acting with the Argot theater cooperative and taking on minor roles in Pietro Natoli’s Ladri di cinema (The Film Thief, 1994) and Umberto Marino’s Cuore cattivo (Heartless, 1995). After coming to notice as the young policeman escorting a Mafia informant in Claudio Fragasso’s Palermo Milano solo andata (Palermo–Milano One Way, 1995), he scored his first starring role as the confused young Walter in Davide Ferrario’s Tutti giù per terra (We All Fall Down, 1997). A year later, he provided one of his best early performances as Remo Guerra, the ruthless leader of the infamous Clockwork Orange Gang, in Claudio Caligari’s L’odore della notte (The Scent of Night, 1998). He returned to the stage and attracted much praise playing the title role in a long-running production of the famous and much-loved Roman musical Rugantino (1998–1999), a part that had been taken in the original production by Nino Manfredi. Coming back to the big screen, he was impressive as Stefano, the road-racing mechanic, in Daniele Vicari’s Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity, 2002) although less so playing Max, the physics researcher, in L’orizzonte degli eventi (Event Horizon, 2005). Two years later, he gave life on the screen to the wayward and aging punk wannabe rock star Stefano Nardini in Gianni Zanassi’s Non pensarci (Don’t Think about It,

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2007), a character that generated such a cult following that Mastrandrea was obliged to reprise the role two years later in the 12-part television series Non pensarci—la serie (2009). With a solid film career behind him, he was now much in demand and, over the next decade, appeared in some 30 films and worked with most of the leading directors: with Giuseppe Piccioni in the melancholic Giulia non esce la sera (Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night, 2009) and, in the same year, with Paolo Virzì in La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing, 2009), in a role that earned him the David di Donatello Best Actor award. In 2012, he changed what had by now become his characteristic acting style in order to play Police Commissioner Luigi Calabresi in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, 2012). In the same year, reverting to his familiar hangdog look, he nevertheless gave one of his most compelling and nuanced performances as Giulio, the ostracized husband and father in Ivano De Matteo’s family drama Gli equilibristi (Balancing Act, 2012), for which he received both the David for Best Actor and, at Venice, the Pasinetti Award. A year later, his role as the minder of absconded party secretary Andrea Bottini in Roberto Andò’s Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom, 2013) brought him the David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actor. Having become very close to writer-director Caligari since playing the lead in L’odore della notte, Mastrandrea passionately took up the cause of helping him to finance what would be his third and, given his precarious health, possibly last film. When even a very public appeal to American director Martin Scorsese to help finance the film failed to ignite any interest, Mastrandrea decided to act as producer himself for Caligari’s Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad, 2015), a film that received 13 David nominations including that of Best Producer. Mastrandrea subsequently returned to the screen as the journalist still trying to cope with the trauma of his mother’s early death in Marco Bellocchio’s Fai bei sogni (Sweet Dreams, 2016) and, a year later, as the protagonist’s father in Claudio Giovannesi’s Fiore (2016), a role that brought him his second David as Best Supporting Actor. Now patently one of the most familiar male faces on the Italian screen, in 2018 he played Ettore, the dour brother unknowingly afflicted with a fatal disease in Valeria Golino’s Euforia (Euphoria, 2018), while also romping his way through Giovanni Veronesi’s swashbuckling Moschettieri del Re: La penultima missione (The King’s Musketeers: The Penultimate Mission, 2018). At the same time, he played Luigi, a patient awaiting major surgery in La linea verticale (The Vertical Line), an eight-part RAI TV series set in the oncology ward of a large metropolitan hospital. In addition, after having already made an early attempt at directing with Trevirgolaventisette (Three Point Two Seven), a 12-minute short dealing with deaths in the workplace, which had earned him the Nastro d’argento for Best Short Film in 2005, he

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directed his first full feature, Ride (Laughing, 2018). Warmly received, the film won the Prize of the City of Turin at the Turin Film Festival as well as sharing the Nastro d’argento award for Best Emerging Director. MASTROIANNI, MARCELLO (1924–1996). Actor. Undoubtedly the actor who most came to represent Italian cinema in the postwar period, Mastroianni began acting in films from a relatively young age, making early appearances as an uncredited extra in Alessandro Blasetti’s La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941) and Vittorio De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944). After carrying out his military service during World War II, he returned to Rome and entered the theater, where he worked extensively with Luchino Visconti. By the early 1950s, he had returned to films, at first doing minor parts, as in Luciano Emmer’s Domenica d’agosto (A Sunday in August, 1950) and Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952), but soon taking on more significant supporting roles, as in Carlo Lizzani’s Cronache di poveri amanti (Chronicle of Poor Lovers, 1954). His interpretation of the male romantic lead in Giuseppe De Santis’s Giorni d’amore (Days of Love, 1954) earned him his first Nastro d’argento. Thanks to Alessandro Blasetti, he was soon paired with Sophia Loren in the first of many films they would make together, beginning with Blasetti’s Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954) and La fortuna di essere donna (What a Woman!, 1956). Two years later, his moving portrayal of Mario in Visconti’s Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) earned him another Nastro d’argento. Having conquered drama, his considerable talent for comedy was then fully brought to the fore in Mario Monicelli’s hilarious I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958). With his reputation now securely established, in the early 1960s he appeared in most of the key films of both established and up-and-coming directors, including Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio (Bell’ Antonio, 1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (Night, 1961), Valerio Zurlini’s Cronaca familiare (Family Diary, 1962), and, perhaps most memorably, as the lovable scoundrel of a husband in Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), a finely modulated interpretation that earned him his first Oscar nomination. By this time, however, he had already become well known to international audiences playing the wayward journalist Marcello in Federico Fellini’s landmark film La dolce vita (1960), for which he had received another Nastro d’argento. He subsequently became Fellini’s onscreen alter ego in the Oscar-winning Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). At the same time, he continued to garner both national and international acclaim playing opposite a fiery Sophia Loren at the peak of her prowess in De Sica’s Ieri,

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oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), which was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1965, and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), also nominated for two Oscars. In the next decade, he continued to work with all the major directors, appearing in, among others, Visconti’s Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967), Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia—tutti i particolari in cronaca (Drama of Jealousy, 1970), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfan (1974), Marco Ferreri’s La grande abbuffata (The Grande Bouffe, 1973), and Luigi Comencini’s La donna della domenica (The Sunday Woman, 1976). Arguably his best performance during this period was as Gabriele, the gay radio journalist in Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), a role that saw him again paired with Sophia Loren and that brought out the very best in both of them. In the 1980s, he again worked with Fellini in La città delle donne (City of Women, 1980) and Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986) and gave a magisterial performance as Casanova in Scola’s La nuit de Varennes (That Night in Varennes, 1982). By the end of the 1980s, however, he was tending toward more fatherly roles as in Scola’s Che ora è? (What Time Is It?, 1989) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine, 1990). Nevertheless, in 1994 he was induced by Robert Altman to team up again with Sophia Loren in a reprise of their legendary performance in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow for Altman’s satire on the fashion industry Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994). After playing the title role in Roberto Faenza’s Sostiene Pereira (According to Pereira, 1995) and a man with what appeared to be four personalities in Raul Ruiz’s Trois vies et une seule mort (Three Lives and Only One Death, 1996), Mastroianni made his final film appearance in Manoel de Oliveira’s Viagem ao Principio do Mundo (Voyage to the Beginning of the World, 1997), where, rather fittingly perhaps, after a life devoted to the cinema, he played the part of an aging film director traveling with a film crew through Portugal in search of the origins of a famous French actor. Having already received innumerable prizes for his appearances in some 140 films, in 1997 Mastroianni was posthumously awarded both a Special Nastro d’argento and a David di Donatello for his career in cinema. Before dying, he recounted his life story in Marcello Mastroianni: Mi ricordo, sì mi ricordo (Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, 1997), a three-hour documentary directed by his long-time companion Anna Maria Tatò. MASTROIANNI, RUGGERO (1929–1996). Editor. Younger brother of Marcello Mastroianni, Ruggero Mastroianni was as widely respected as a film editor as his brother was an actor. Beginning with Giuseppe De Santis’s Giorni d’amore (Days of Love, 1954), Mastroianni served as assistant editor on a number of films before graduating to editor on Enzo Provenzale’s Vento del sud (South Wind, 1959). He subsequently worked extensively with both

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established and up-and-coming directors, including Luchino Visconti, Francesco Maselli, Nanni Loy, Lina Wertmüller, and Mario Monicelli, and he formed a special relationship with Elio Petri, all of whose major films he edited. In 1965, with Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), he also initiated a long and fruitful collaboration with Federico Fellini, for whom he would edit all the films from the Toby Dammit episode in Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead, 1968) to Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986). At the same time, beginning with Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago, 1970), he also worked extensively with Francesco Rosi and in fact died while preparing to edit Rosi’s La tregua (The Truce, 1996). In a long career that saw him collaborate on more than 150 films, he received many honors and awards, including winning the David di Donatello four times and the Nastro d’argento for his edit of Monicelli’s Speriamo che sia femina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl, 1986). MATARAZZO, RAFFAELLO (1909–1966). Director and screenwriter. Probably best remembered for the series of extremely popular heart-tugging melodramas he directed in the 1950s, Matarazzo had begun his career in cinema in the 1920s as a film critic writing for, among others, Alessandro Blasetti’s journal Cinematografo. Together with Blasetti and others who were connected with the journal, Matarazzo joined the revived Cines studio during Emilio Cecchi’s period as artistic director and, with Cecchi’s encouragement, began working as a screenwriter while also making several of the Cines series of documentaries, among them Mussolinia di Sardegna (1933) and Littoria (1933). His first solo feature was Treno popolare (People’s Train, 1933), a charming fictional travelogue to Orvieto, often regarded as a distant forerunner of Neorealism, also notable as the first film scored by composer Nino Rota. This promising debut was followed by a number of light situational comedies and what came to be known as white telephone films, the best of which was L’avventuriera del piano di sopra (The Adventuress from the Floor Above, 1941), which ably employed the talents of Vittorio De Sica and Clara Calamai in the leading roles. After the war, Matarazzo first directed Fumeria d’oppio (Opium Den, 1947), a promising but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at reviving the Za-laMort character who had been made so famous by Emilio Ghione during the silent era (Ghione’s son starred in the film). Two years later, however, Matarazzo struck box office gold with Catene (Chains, 1949), the first of a long line of enormously popular tear-jerking melodramas featuring the romantic couple Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson. Over the next decade, he continued his run of box office successes with Figli di Nessuno (Nobody’s Children, 1951), Chi è senza peccato (Whoever Is without Sin, 1952), L’Angelo Bianco (The White Angel, 1955), and Malinconico autunno (Mel-

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ancholic Autumn, 1959). By the early 1960s, however, with interest in the genre fading, his own star also waned, and his last romantic melodrama, Amore mio (My Love, 1964), passed largely unnoticed.

Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson in a scene from Raffaello Matarazzo’s Tormento (Torment, 1950). Courtesy of Photofest.

MATTOLI, MARIO (1898–1980). Director and screenwriter. A popular genre director who came to be associated mainly with comedy and melodrama, Mattoli graduated in law before working as the legal administrator for the Suvini-Zerboni theater company. In 1927, he founded Spettacoli Za-bum, a theatrical revue company whose productions attracted the participation of many fine actors of the time, including the young Vittorio De Sica. In 1934, Mattoli initiated what would be an extraordinarily prolific film career by writing and directing Tempo massimo (Full Speed, 1934), a romantic comedy that starred De Sica and popular singer Milly (Carla Mignone) and included future star Anna Magnani in a minor role. From then until the war years, Mattoli directed a host of light comedies and melodramas, sometimes as many as six films in one year. His first real success, however, came with Imputato alzatevi (Let the Accused Rise, 1939), a film now regarded as something of a landmark in Italian comedy that also definitively launched the screen career of popular comedian Erminio Macario. In the immediate postwar period, Mattoli directed La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945) followed by a remake of the classic silent melodrama Assunta Spina (1948), with Anna Magnani in the role of the Neapolitan laundress that had originally been played by the silent-era diva Francesca

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Bertini. By this time, Mattoli had also begun directing Totò in I due orfanelli (The Two Orphans, 1947), the first of 16 films Mattoli would make with the great comic actor that would include such classics as Un turco napoletano (Neapolitan Turk, 1953), Miseria e nobiltà (Poverty and Nobility, 1954), and Totò, Fabrizi e i giovani d’oggi (Totò, Fabrizi and the Young People of Today, 1960). Still directing at the rate of three or four films a year, in the early 1960s Mattoli helped launch the film career of the comic duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia with Appuntamento a Ischia (Rendezvous at Ischia, 1960), while at the same time injecting some comedy into the peplum genre with his Maciste contro Ercole nella valle dei guai (Hercules in the Valley of Woe, 1961). After making close to 90 films in 30 years, Mattoli directed his last film in 1966, a spoof on the then-flourishing genre of the Spaghetti Western titled Per qualche dollaro in meno (For a Few Dollars Less, 1966). MAZZACURATI, CARLO (1956–2014). Director and screenwriter. One of the first young directors to be hailed as a representative of the so-called New Italian Cinema, Mazzacurati had studied at the Department of Music, Arts and Spectacle at the university of Bologna before self-financing his first short film, Vagabondi (Vagabonds, 1979). After working for television and then collaborating on the screenplay of what would later become Gabriele Salvatores’s Marrakech Express (1989), he secured the support of Nanni Moretti’s newly established Sacher Film company for his first feature, Notte Italiana (Italian Night, 1987). An atmospheric tale of crime and corruption set in the Po delta area of the Italian northeast, the film was highly praised and earned Mazzacurati the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. His second feature, Il prete bello (The Handsome Priest, 1989), however, was generally regarded as lackluster and disappointing, but his talent appeared to be reconfirmed with his subsequent Un’altra vita (Another Life, 1992) and Il toro (The Bull, 1994), an interesting variation on the road movie that recounted the story of two male friends attempting to transport a stolen stud bull to Hungary in the hope of making a huge profit. The bittersweet comedy was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Festival that year, and two years later his Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast, 1996), the tragic story of a Czech girl’s attempts to remain in Italy, was also nominated for the Golden Lion. L’estate di Davide (David’s Summer, 1998), a powerful but unsentimental coming-of-age film originally made for television, was followed by the tragicomic La lingua del santo (Holy Tongue, 1999) and A cavallo della tigre (Riding the Tiger, 2002), in which Mazzacurati continued to explore the life of eccentric individuals living on the social fringe. L’amore ritrovato (An Italian Romance, 2004), adapted from a novel by Carlo Cassola, was a more conventional love story and received a fairly lukewarm response when screened in competition at Venice. Three years

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later, however, he appeared to come back to his best form with another thriller set in the Po Valley, La giusta distanza (The Right Distance, 2007) followed by two very original comedies, La passione (The Passion, 2010) and La sedia della felicità (The Chair of Happiness, 2013), the latter earning him the third Nastro d’argento of his career. A year later, in the wake of his untimely death, he was also awarded a posthumous Special David for his poetic rendition of the Veneto region in so many of his very distinctive films. MELATO, MARIANGELA (1941–2013). Stage and screen actress. After studying painting at the Academy of Brera, Melato served an apprenticeship with a number of minor theater companies before being accepted into the company directed by Dario Fo. Her acting career was greatly boosted in 1967 when she was selected to play the lead in Luchino Visconti’s production of La Monaca di Monza (The Nun of Monza) at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan. She was subsequently given the role of Olimpia in Luca Ronconi’s groundbreaking production of Orlando Furioso (1969) before making her film debut in a small part in Luigi Zampa’s Contestazione generale (Let’s Have a Riot, 1970) and a slightly more significant role in Pupi Avati’s Thomas e gli indemoniati (Thomas and the Bewitched, 1969). Avati’s no-budget film sank without a trace, but Melato’s film career continued with another modest part in Nino Manfredi’s Per grazia ricevuta (Between Miracles, 1971) before scoring the major role of Lidia, the wife of the maniacal factory worker played by Gian Maria Volonté, in Elio Petri’s La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1971). However, she soon achieved both national and international renown, particularly in the United States, playing opposite Giancarlo Giannini in a series of social farces directed by Lina Wertmüller, beginning with Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimi, 1972) and continuing with Film d’amore e d’anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973), Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away, 1974), and Bello mio Bellezza mia (My Darling, My Dearest, 1982). After having also demonstrated her considerable talents as a dancer in Avati’s Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream, 1981) and Maurizio Nichetti’s Domani si balla (Tomorrow We Dance, 1982), she returned to the stage, where she worked again with Ronconi and with Giorgio Strehler. From the early 1990s, she appeared frequently on television, with her interpretation of the role of Marianna in the first two episodes of Franco Giraldi’s Una vita in gioco (A Life on the Line, 1991, 1992) earning her the Best European Actress award. She returned to the big screen at the end of the 1990s in Maurizio Zaccaro’s Un uomo per bene (A Respectable Man, 1999) and Mario Monicelli’s Panni sporchi (Dirty Linen, 1999). In the new millennium, she did appear, largely in supporting roles or in cameos, in several other films but did her best work on the stage, acting in a number of the classic plays and attracting large audiences to her one-

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woman shows. She garnered particular acclaim for her performance in the title role of Eduardo De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano, broadcast on national television in 2010.

Mariangela Melato in Lina Wertmüller’s Film d’amore e d’anarchia (Love and Anarchy, 1973). Courtesy of Photofest.

In addition to numerous prizes and awards for her work in the theater, Melato received the Nastro d’argento five times and eight David di Donatello awards, as well as in 1986 the Special Medal of the City of Rome and the David Golden Plate in 2000.

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MENICHELLI, PINA (1890–1984). Actress and diva. Born of a Sicilian couple who were both actors, Pina (short for Giuseppina) Menichelli made her screen debut in 1913 playing small parts in comic sketches produced by the Cines company. She was soon taking on more substantial roles in films such as Baldassare Negroni’s Zuma (1913) and Enrico Guazzoni’s Scuola d’eroi (School for Heroes, 1914), in which Menichelli played a patriotic and self-sacrificing young drummer in the Napoleonic wars. Already popular as an actress and a frequent cover girl of the various film magazines of the time, she was consecrated to stardom by her appearance in Giovanni Pastrone’s Il fuoco (The Fire, 1915), in which she played a mysterious noblewoman who, with her morbid beauty and languid sensuality, lured a sensitive young painter to her castle only to destroy him. Although severely cut by the censors, as were a number of Menichelli’s subsequent films, Il fuoco was extremely popular and elevated her to the same status as the reigning divas Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini. Her superstar status was reinforced by her appearance in Pastrone’s next film, Tigre Reale (Royal Tigress, 1916), adapted from a novel by realist writer Giovanni Verga, which Menichelli saturated with a decadent sensuality far beyond anything in the original text. Menichelli utilized her highly gestural style to consistently convey a certain perverse insouciance and an aggressive sensuality that distinguished her from the more morbid Pre-Raphaelitism of her fellow divas and kept her popular into the 1920s. She was still having an electrifying effect on both critics and the public in 1921 with her portrayal of a precocious 17-year-old in L’età critica (The Critical Age), directed by Amleto Palermi. Having married Baron Carlo Amato, head of Rinascimento Film, in 1920, she acted exclusively for that production house until she retired permanently from the cinema in 1924. MERLI, MAURIZIO (1940–1989). Actor. After having graduated as a qualified accountant at the age of 19, Merli enrolled in Rome’s Silvio D’Amico Academy of Dramatic Art. Four months later, having been hired to work with the Teatro delle Muse, and in accordance with the institution’s prohibition against students working professionally before their graduation, he withdrew from the academy. While serving his apprenticeship on the stage he also made a first attempt to break into films, but after managing no more than a fleeting and uncredited appearance as an extra in Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), he turned to television where he was able to play a more substantial role in the eight-part RAI miniseries I grandi camaleonti (The Great Chameleons, 1964). While waiting for more television work, he returned to the stage and acted in reviews and musicals as well as in radio plays. In 1969, he scored something of a coup in being asked to play several of the minor roles in Luca Ronconi’s groundbreaking production of L’Orlando furioso. His real break, however, only came in 1974 when

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he came to public notice playing the legendary Risorgimento hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi, in the television miniseries Il giovane Garibaldi. At the same time, by all accounts largely due to his resemblance to Franco Nero, he was hired to play the male lead in Zanna bianca alla riscossa (White Fang to the Rescue, 1974), the sequel to Lucio Fulci’s hugely successful canine adventure Zanna bianca (White Fang), made the previous year. Soon after, and again due to his uncanny resemblance to Franco Nero, he was chosen to play Police Commissioner Betti in Marino Girolami’s Roma violenta (Violent City, 1975), a steely eyed tough-cop character that he would reprise a year later in Umberto Lenzi’s Roma a mano armata (The Tough Ones, 1976), and the model of the ruthless, upright policeman, at times resorting to dubious means, that he would incarnate in another dozen polizieschi in the next five years, including Lenzi’s classic of the genre, Il cinico, l’infame, il violento (The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist, 1977) and Stelvio Massi’s similarly iconic Il commissario di ferro (The Iron Commissioner, 1978). His ability and willingness to do all his own dangerous stunts in these tension-ridden high-octane action films made him particularly dear to directors such as Lenzi, who would subsequently forever sing his praises as an actor. Although he did also occasionally venture into the other genres—in 1977 he acquitted himself well as the axe-wielding incarnation of vengeance in the Spaghetti Western Mannaja (A Man called Blade, 1977) and also made a brief foray into the spy genre in Romolo Guerrieri’s Sono stato un agente C.I.A. (Covert Action, 1978) and Giorgio Bontempi’s Notturno (Spy Connection, 1983)—he is most indelibly remembered as the face of the tough police commissioner of the poliziesco. Ironically, for an actor who had braved so many of the perils of so many action films, Merli died prematurely, aged 49, from a heart attack he suffered during a social match of tennis. MEZZOGIORNO, GIOVANNA (1974–). Actress. Daughter of stage and screen actor Vittorio Mezzogiorno and actress Cecilia Sacchi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno originally trained to become a ballerina but, at the age of 19, following her father’s untimely death, moved to Paris to study acting with legendary theater director Peter Brook. Recognizing her innate talent, Brook chose her to play the part of Ophelia in Qui est là, a radical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which she toured throughout Europe and for which she received the 1996 Coppola-Prati Theater Award. The following year, having returned to Italy, she made her film debut starring in Sergio Rubini’s Il viaggio della sposa (The Bride’s Journey, 1997) in a performance that brought her the Italian Golden Globe as Best Emerging Actress and a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. A year later, she received both the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress and the Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Festival for her performance as Liliana, the fiery young

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communist schoolteacher in Michele Placido’s Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love, 1998). After brief appearances on French television as Soeur Simplice in the miniseries Les misérables (2000), she attracted a David di Donatello Best Actress nomination playing the role of Giulia, the faithful and pregnant fiancée betrayed by the wayward Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) in Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss, 2001). Having thus established a reputation as one of Italy’s finest actresses, she went on to cement it portraying the young RAI journalist killed in Mogadishu in 1994 while investigating the trafficking of toxic waste in Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani’s Ilaria Alpi—il più crudele dei giorni (The Cruelest Day, 2002) and then as Giovanna, the unhappy wife and mother, fantasizing about romance with a handsome stranger, in Ferzan Ozpetek’s La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows, 2003), the latter finally bringing her the David di Donatello for Best Actress. She was able to provide an even more powerful performance as the adult Sabina struggling to come to terms with childhood incest in Cristina Comencini’s La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell, 2005), a role that attracted a further host of prizes and nominations, not least the prestigious Coppa Volpi at Venice. After a convincing portrayal of both the young and the older Fermina in Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), she gave what for many remains one of her greatest performances as Ida Dalser, Benito Mussolini’s disowned former wife and mother of his first child, in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2008), for which she received not only a nomination for the David and the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress at home but also the CinEuphoria and the American National Society of Film Critics’ Best Actress awards. A year later, she played the ruthless left-wing female terrorist Susanna Ronconi in Renato De Maria’s La prima linea (The Front Line, 2009) while at the same time producing and narrating Negli occhi (In the Eyes), a revealing documentary about her father that received both the Biografilm Award and Controcampo Italiano Prize—Special Mention at that year’s Venice Film Festival. After walking through the much-less-demanding role of the bored young journalist tagging along in Rocco Papaleo’s Basilicata Coast to Coast (2010), Mezzogiorno abandoned acting for a period in order to dedicate herself to motherhood. In 2013, she returned in earnest to play the protagonist’s vengeful wife, Adele, in Orgnani’s quirky comic mystery thriller Vinodentro (Re-Wined, 2013) before being one of the two pairs of related parents attempting to come to terms with a murder possibly committed by their two children in Ivano De Matteo’s I nostri ragazzi (The Dinner, 2014). Three years later, she gave one of her most moving performances to date as Elena, the estranged daughter of the old curmudgeon Lorenzo, in Gianni Amelio’s La tenerezza (Tenderness, 2017) before playing a woman trying to solve the mystery of the death and disappearance of a casual lover in Ozpetek’s Napoli

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velata (Naples in Veils, 2018). At the same time, she returned to work on the stage, appearing in a much-lauded production of Jon Fosse’s Dream of Autumn at Milan’s Teatro Franco Parenti. MEZZOGIORNO, VITTORIO (1941–1994). Actor. Nurturing a passion for acting from his earliest days, Mezzogiorno studied law at the University of Naples to please his father but, upon graduation, reverted to his first love, the theater. In 1966, he succeeded in serving an apprenticeship with the legendary Neapolitan theater company of Eduardo De Filippo. By the early 1970s, while continuing to work on the stage, he also began taking on minor roles in films, beginning with a tiny part in Eriprando Visconti’s Il caso Pisciotta (The Pisciotta Case, 1972) and appearing on television in RAI miniseries such as L’assassinio dei fratelli Rosselli (The Assassination of the Rosselli Brothers, 1974) and Il Marsigliese (The Man from Marseilles, 1975). In 1976, he played one of the toughest criminals in Mario Caiano’s violent poliziesco Milano violenta (Violent Milan) before switching sides to play Sauro, the good policeman in Giuliano Montaldo’s Il giocattolo (The Toy, 1979), a role that brought him the recognition of a Nastro d’argento for Best Supporting Actor. But his finest performance during this period was undoubtedly playing Rocco Giuranna, the middle brother in Francesco Rosi’s Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1980), for which he received the Silver Ribbon for Best Actor. With a growing reputation outside Italy, he soon appeared in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s La lune dans le caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter, 1983) and as the gay hustler in Patrice Chéreau’s L’homme blessé (The Wounded Man, 1983). This brought him to the notice of theater director Peter Brook, who was preparing his production of the Indian epic Mahabharata and thus cast him in the leading role of Arjuna. The production toured internationally to great acclaim for the next four years before Brook, also a filmmaker, immortalized it, and Mezzogiorno’s performance as Arjuna, in a nine-hour film, later screened on television as a three-episode miniseries. Returning to television himself, Mezzogiorno then appeared in the role for which he would be most remembered by Italian audiences, that of the besieged police commissioner, Davide Licata, in season 5 (1990) and season 6 (1992) of the long-running Mafia series La piovra (Octopus). At the same time, and while continuing to work onstage, he also returned to the big screen, appearing as the veteran mountaineer in Werner Herzog’s Schrei aus Stein (Scream of Stone, 1991), in a harrowing performance that earned him both a Golden Ciak and the Pasinetti Award as Best Actor at the Venice Festival that year. After playing the Maharal (rabbi) in Amos Gitai’s allegorical film Golem, l’esprit de l’exil (Golem: The Spirit of Exile, 1992), Mezzogiorno’s final appearance before his untimely death was in Angelo Longoni’s Caccia alle mosche (Fly-Hunting, 1993).

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In 2009, Mezzogiorno’s life and work were celebrated in Negli occhi (In the Eyes), a documentary directed by Daniele Anzilotti and Francesco Del Grosso and produced by his daughter, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, which was screened to much acclaim at the Venice Film Festival. MILANO FILMS. Production company. Formed in 1908 as a further transformation of the SAFFI-Comerio, Milano Films quickly developed into one of the principal Italian production companies of the silent era. Run largely by a board of aristocrats with high moral principles and pedagogic ideals, Milano pursued a declared policy of making films of high cultural and aesthetic value. Its first major production, three years in the making, was the first fulllength (1,200 meters) adaptation of the most revered of all Italian literary works, Dante’s Inferno. Closely based on the well-known illustrated edition of the poem by Gustave Doré, the film was hailed both at home and abroad as a landmark achievement of cinematic art. Writer and theorist Ricciotto Canudo delivered a public lecture on the film at the École des Hautes Études directly after its first public screening in Paris to underscore his thesis that cinema was, in fact, the seventh art. Employing many of the major directors of the period, among them Baldassare Negroni and Augusto Genina, and the attraction of divas such as Pina Menichelli, Mercedes Brignone, and Lina Millefleurs, the company continued its prolific production of relatively high-quality films until the early 1920s, when it too succumbed to the general crisis that engulfed the Italian film industry. One of the few companies not to join the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union) in 1919, it chose to reduce its production of films in favor of providing printing and postproduction services to other companies until it closed shop altogether at the end of the 1920s. By this stage a shadow of its former self, it had apparently been the best studio in Europe when set up originally by Luca Comerio in 1909. Milano’s studios at the Bovisa were used sporadically during the 1930s, and again in the late 1950s, by other companies. MILIAN, TOMAS (1933–2017). Actor. A prolific and much-loved actor who would appear in more than 100 films, Milian, born Tomás Quintin Rodriguez in Havana, Cuba, suffered a brutal end to a relatively happy childhood in Havana in witnessing the suicide of his father, a former army officer still faithful to the Batista regime. Several years later, still traumatized by the event, a viewing of James Dean similarly attempting to deal with a father’s death in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) sparked a desire in him to go to America to become an actor. He soon abandoned Cuba and, first in Miami and then in New York, struggled at menial jobs before, by dint of perseverance, being accepted into the famous Actors Studio. While honing his craft in

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off-Broadway theater productions and a brief appearance in a popular television police series, he was noticed by Jean Cocteau and Gian Carlo Menotti, who were scouting for talent and thus engaged him to perform a Cocteau pantomime at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds. It was his impressive performance at Spoleto that prompted a number of film offers and so sparked off a successful career on the Italian silver screen. After supporting parts in Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (The Big Night, 1959) and Il bell’Antonio (Bell’ Antonio, 1960), he shouldered more significant roles in films such as Luchino Visconti’s “Il lavoro” (Work), an episode of the anthology film Boccaccio ’70 (1962); Francesco Maselli’s Gli indifferenti (A Time of Indifference, 1964); and Valerio Zurlini’s Le soldatesse (The Camp Followers, 1965). Having at this point achieved a solid reputation as a serious art-cinema actor, he nevertheless subsequently veered into the Spaghetti Western genre, pretty well at its height at the time, and boisterously starred in a half dozen of what are regarded as classics of the genre, including Sergio Sollima’s trilogy La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown, 1966), Faccia a faccia (Face to Face, 1967), and Corri uomo corri (Run, Man, Run, 1968), as well as Giulio Questi’s remarkably violent Se sei vivo spara (Django Kill . . . If You Live, Shoot!, 1967). A year later, playing the elegant but tough Police Commissioner Basevi in Carlo Lizzani’s contemporary crime drama, Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four, 1968), Milian made his entry into the poliziesco genre (effectively a carbon copy Monnezza, albeit on the right side of the law) that would supplant the Western in the 1970s and in which Milian would find a natural home, alternating with extreme ease between playing the tough cop obsessed with revenge, as in Stelvio Massi’s Squadra volante (Emergency Squad, 1974), and the most psychopathic of criminals, like Giulio Sacchi in Umberto Lenzi’s Milano odia: La polizia non può sparare (Almost Human, 1974). It was within the poliziesco that Milian would create the character of Er Monnezza (Mr. Trash), a rough-edged but wily petty thief with a sense of humor and a heart of gold, whom Milian would subsequently treat as something of his alter ego. While continuing to work largely in genre films, he nevertheless also periodically came to be drawn back into “quality” cinema, taking on a major supporting role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (Luna, 1979), for which he received a Nastro d’argento, and playing the male lead in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identificazione d’una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982). Following Delitto al Blue Gay (Cop in Drag, 1984), the last of almost a dozen comic polizieschi directed by Bruno Corbucci in which he had played the loveable rogue Police Inspector Nico Giraldi, Milian returned to America, where he made cameo appearances in a host of television series including Miami Vice (1985), Drug Wars (1990), and L.A. Law (1991). He subsequently also appeared in minor roles in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) and Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) before giving two of the most memorable perfor-

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mances of his prolific career, as the duplicitous General Arturo Salazar in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) and as Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, in Luis Llosa’s adaptation of Mario Varga Llosa’s novel The Feast of the Goat (2005). He thereafter retired to Miami. In 2014, he became the subject of Giuseppe Sansonna’s documentary The Cuban Hamlet—Storia di Tomas Milian, and at the same time, he published his memoir, Monnezza amore mio (Monnezza My Love, 2014, coauthored with Manlio Gomarasca).

Tomas Milian as Cuchillo in Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown, 1966). Courtesy of Photofest.

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MINGOZZI, GIANFRANCO (1932–2009). Director, screenwriter, and producer. Although a passionate cinephile from an early age—his parents owned the local cinema in his native town of San Pietro Capofiume—Mingozzi chose to complete a degree in law at the University of Bologna before moving to Rome to attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Having graduated with honors from the Centro, he began an apprenticeship working as a voluntary assistant on Gianni Franciolini’s Ferdinando I, re di Napoli (Ferdinand I, King of Naples, 1959) and, more notably, with Federico Fellini on La dolce vita (1960), in which he also appeared (uncredited) in a small role. Although he would subsequently write and direct more than a dozen well-regarded and commercially successful fictional features for the big screen—among them Trio (1967), Flavia, la monaca mussulmana (Flavia, the Heretic, 1974), La vela incantata (The Enchanted Sail, 1982), L’appassionata (The Passionate Woman, 1988), and Tobia al caffè (Tobias at the Café, 2000)—and produce and direct several popular television series and telefilms, Mingozzi has come to be best remembered for the impressive series of documentaries he continued to make in parallel with his fictional features. These ranged from important anthropological shorts such as his groundbreaking La taranta (Tarantula, 1962) and Con il cuore fermo, Sicilia (Sicily, with a Steadfast Heart, 1965), winner of the Golden Lion for Documentary at the Venice Festival in 1965, to full-length studies in the history of the cinema such as his invaluable L’ultima diva: Francesca Bertini (The Last Diva, 1982), a detailed portrait in her own words of leading star of the Italian silent screen, Francesca Bertini, and Bellissimo: Immagini del cinema italiano (Beautiful: Images of the Italian Cinema, 1997). Rather fittingly, his last film, made only a year before his death, was the celebratory documentary Noi che abbiamo fatto La dolce vita (We who made La dolce vita, 2009). MONDO FILM. Genre. Born in Italy but soon becoming a worldwide phenomenon, the mondo film was a form of sensational documentary with the declared aim of surprising and shocking the viewer with sights of the world allegedly never before seen, hence its coming to be known as the “shockumentary.” The ultimate roots of the genre undoubtedly lie in cinema’s potential to startle and amaze, but in Italy the most immediate forerunner of the genre is usually held to have been Alessandro Blasetti’s Europa di notte (European Nights, 1959), a sophisticate’s tour of the nightlife and entertainment acts performing on the stages of the major European cities at the end of the 1950s. The unexpected box office success of Blasetti’s film led to the entertainment tour becoming global in Luigi Vanzi’s Mondo di notte (World by Night, 1960), which was immediately followed by its sequel Il mondo di notte numero 2 (World by Night no. 2, 1961). It is nevertheless universally agreed that the birth of the shockumentary mondo film occurs with Mondo cane

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(1962), created by journalist-writer Gualtiero Jacopetti, who had scripted and recited the voice-over commentary of Europa di notte, in collaboration with naturalist and documentarian Franco Prosperi and aspiring filmmaker Paolo Cavara. After scouring the globe for two years, the trio had been able to assemble an extensive gallery of intriguing events, strange rituals, and bizarre practices from around the world, all expertly photographed so as to exploit to the maximum their voyeuristic value and their potential for strong emotional engagement. When released in 1962, the film carried a written epigraph (also spoken in voice-over in the English version) that would remain the implicit boast, and often the explicitly declared credo, of every subsequent mondo film: “All the scenes you are about to see are true and are taken only from life. If often they are shocking, it is because there are many shocking things in this world. In any case, the duty of the chronicler is not to sweeten the truth but to report it objectively.” Effectively edited to give such disparate material a sense of coherence and continuity, and with an elegant but always wry verbal commentary, penned and spoken by Jacopetti himself, Mondo cane put on show sights as different as the disturbing Good Friday ritual in Nocera Tirinese in Calabria where the so-called Vaccenti run half naked through the streets in anticipation of Christ’s Passion, continuing to purposely lacerate their thighs until they bleed, to a dutiful housewife in Singapore nonchalantly buying live snakes for the family dinner, with the darting reptiles skinned alive by the shopkeeper and deposited still wriggling into her shopping basket. Something of a visual tour de force, the film achieved an enormous success at the box office, part of its drawing power coming from a memorable musical score composed by Riz Ortolani, with its centerpiece, the theme song “More,” being nominated for an Oscar and within weeks becoming one of the most recorded and still performed songs of the popular repertoire. Seeking to exploit the film’s success, the trio immediately followed up with La donna nel mondo (Women of the World, 1963) and, utilizing in part material left over from the first film, the slightly less compelling Mondo cane 2 (1963). Following the sequel’s poor showing at the box office, Jacopetti and Prosperi decided to continue to practice their unflinching style of documentary filmmaking in Africa, which at the time was going through the violent throes of de-colonization, while Cavara left the group in order to make another mondo movie on his own. In a bid to capture the most graphic footage of the turmoil that was turning the old Africa upside down, Jacopetti and Prosperi criss-crossed the continent for three years; in the process, they became caught up in a great deal of the violence and the killings that were occurring before their eyes, including the horrifying slaughter of wildlife in the natural parks, much of which they were able to record. Given the number of graphic deaths they were capturing on film, the film crew soon came to be accused in the Italian press of actually helping to organize the killings in

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order to film them, and Jacopetti was forced to return to Italy to defend the charges. They were eventually exonerated of the charges but, ironically, only by Jacopetti being obliged to confess that, as documentary filmmakers, they did at times engage in restaging certain of the most gruesome scenes for the camera. The resultant publicity nevertheless served to heighten expectations so that when Africa Addio (Africa: Blood and Guts) was finally released in 1966, it became the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. It also achieved significant critical recognition, in America winning the National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Film and at home the David di Donatello for Best Production, although the minister for culture refused to present the award personally due to what was judged to be the film’s political incorrectness. In the meantime, in Italy the mondo film had come into its own, with 1963 seeing the release of Romolo Marcellini’s I tabu (Taboos of the World), Gianni Proia’s Il mondo di notte numero 3 (Ecco), and Roberto Bianchi Montero’s Mondo infame. A year later, Montero released Mondo balordo (A Fool’s World), alongside Cavara’s I Malamondo (Malamondo), Antonio Margheriti’s Il pelo nel mondo (Mondo Inferno), and Maleno and Roberto Malenotti’s Le schiave esistono ancora (There Are Still Slaves in the World). The year 1965 saw the mondo movie begin to emerge in America with Bob Sokoler’s Wild, Wild World (“So starling, so shocking, so strange, you won’t believe it even after you’ve seen it”) and continue a year later with Robert Lee Frost’s Mondo Bizarro and Mondo Freudo, soon followed by Joseph P. Mawra’s Mondo oscenità (1966), Peter Perry’s Mondo Mod (1967), and Robert Carl Cohen’s Mondo Hollywood (1967), which carried the tagline “outshocks any mondo film ever made.” Yet perhaps the most shocking mondo film ever made was still coming from Jacopetti and Prosperi themselves. Hurt by accusations in some quarters that Africa Addio had been racist in its commentary’s critique of decolonization, the duo were at this time preparing to redeem themselves with Addio Zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom, 1971), a spectacularly staged and acted fictional documentary in which the two filmmakers somehow journeyed in a helicopter back in time to the antebellum American South in order to provide a truer, and more shocking, picture of slavery than anything previously seen. Filmed almost completely in Haiti and having been subjected to significant cuts and modifications before it could be released in an English version in the United States in 1972, the film drew hostility and outrage from all quarters, with Roger Ebert declaring it “the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary” and Pauline Kael offended by “the voyeuristic hypocrisy of the movie.” The film had a brief season with an X-rating before disappearing.

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Gualtiero Jacopetti (1919–2011). Courtesy of Photofest.

The 1970s in Italy witnessed a continuation of the more urbane mondo of the 1960s in films like Filippo Walter Ratti’s Mondo erotico (1973) and Gianni Proia’s Mondo di notte oggi (World by Night Today, 1978) but also saw brothers Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni take up the lesson of Africa Addio to develop a more extreme form of cruel mondo in their Africa ama (Africa Uncensored, 1971), Magia nuda (Mondo Magic, 1975), and Addio ultimo uomo (The Last Savage, 1978). Jocopetti’s regular cinematographer, Antonio Climati, and editor, Mario Morra, also contributed to this extreme development with their “Savage Trilogy”: Ultime grida dalla savana (Savage Man Savage Beast, 1975), Savana violenta (This Violent World, 1976), and Dolce e selvaggio (Sweet and Savage, 1983). Against this background Jacopetti and Prosperi’s final film together, Mondo Candido (1975), a free adaptation of Voltaire’s novel in which the young Candide travels the globe testing the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds, represented the Italian mondo film at its most lyrical and philosophical. At the same time, in Italy a spin-off subgenre emerged in the form of the Italian cannibal film, a genre practiced by Umberto Lenzi in his Il paese del sesso selvaggio (Man from Deep River, 1972), Mangiati vivi (Eaten Alive, 1980), and Cannibal Ferox (Make Them Die Slowly, 1981) and by Ruggero Deodato in his classics of the genre, Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal

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World, 1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), still marketed as “the most controversial movie ever made.” Like Jacopetti before him, Deodato was forced to defend himself on charges of having actually murdered people for the benefit of the camera, although he too was able to prove that the horrific deaths shown in the film had been staged. In America, however, one spin-off of the mondo film was the fascination with real death in Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader’s The Killing of America (1982) and John Alan Schwartz’s The Faces of Death series (1978–1996). In an interview in 2003, Jacopetti and Prosperi admitted that the mondo film would have no purchase in the global culture of the new millennium because all its functions had been taken over by reality TV and, more recently, of course, by online real-time broadcasters, such as YouTube. MONICELLI, MARIO (1915–2010). Screenwriter and director. One of Italy’s most prolific and consistently popular directors, Monicelli worked in many genres but came to be regarded above all as a master practitioner of the commedia all’italiana. Interested in cinema from a very young age, Monicelli began making 16 mm films while still a student in Milan. I ragazzi di via Paal (The Boys of Via Paal, 1935), a 20-minute film shot in 16 mm and financed by his cousin, Alberto Mondadori, won first prize at the Venice Festival in 1935, allowing Monicelli to begin serving an apprenticeship at the Pisorno film studios, where he acted as assistant to established filmmakers such as Gustav Machatý, Mario Camerini, Giacomo Gentilomo, and Augusto Genina. By the early 1940s, he had also begun screenwriting, an activity he continued in the immediate postwar period, working on the scripts of a host of films that included Gennaro Righelli’s Il corriere del re (The King’s Courier, 1947), Mario Camerini’s La figlia del capitano (The Captain’s Daughter, 1947), and Raffaello Matarazzo’s unsuccessful attempt to revive the Za-la-Mort character, La fumeria dell’oppio (The Opium Den, 1947). He also collaborated on the screenplay of Giuseppe De Santis’s hugely successful Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and on Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1947) and In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1948). While working on a number of films with Riccardo Freda, Monicelli met fellow screenwriter and future director Steno (Stefano Vanzina), with whom he began writing and codirecting a series of films that included some of the very popular social farces featuring Totò, among them Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), which received the screenwriting prize at that year’s Cannes Festival. Then with Totò e Carolina (Totò and Carolina, made in 1953 but not released until 1955 due to problems with censorship), Monicelli began his long-term collaboration with the screenwriters Age e Scarpelli and Rodolfo Sonego, with whom he would produce many of the key films of the commedia all’italiana.

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National box office success and international renown came with I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), a funny heist-gone-wrong movie that masterfully brought to the fore the considerable comic talents of both a young Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman. The film was a huge hit and marked the birth of what from then on became known as “comedy Italian style.” Monicelli repeated his enormous success with La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), a powerful tragicomic antiwar film that paired Gassman with Alberto Sordi and came to share the Golden Lion at Venice that year with Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959). In 1963, I compagni (The Organizer, 1963), a film recounting the birth of the Socialist movement in Turin in the 1890s, found a lukewarm response in Italy but was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. There followed a host of clever bittersweet comedies, including the picaresque misadventures of L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966) and its sequel, Brancaleone alle crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970). The political satire Vogliamo i colonnelli (We Want the Colonels, 1973) was followed by the extremely popular Amici miei (My Friends, 1975) and Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1976), a successful adaptation of a popular novel by Natalia Ginzburg that was awarded the Silver Bear at Berlin. However, Monicelli’s most significant and provocative film during this period was undoubtedly Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977). Adapted from a novel by Vincenzo Cerami and starring Alberto Sordi in what was undoubtedly one of the most powerful roles of his crowded career, the film recounts the story of a meek and mild public servant who turns into something of a monster as he seeks to exact revenge for the accidental shooting of his teenage son during a botched bank robbery. Although misunderstood by some as an apology for vigilante violence, the film earned Monicelli a David di Donatello for his direction. In the 1980s, again with Sordi, Monicelli made Il marchese del Grillo (Marquis Del Grillo, 1981), which won the Silver Bear at Berlin, but his attempt to repeat the extraordinary popularity of the earlier Amici miei with its sequel, Amici miei atto II (All My Friends, Part 2, 1982), was less successful. Le due vite di Mattia Pascal (The Two Lives of Mattia Pascal, 1985), an adaptation of Pirandello’s novel made in separate versions for television and the big screen, also proved to be something of a flop, but in the same year, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl, 1985) was both popular at the box office and won seven David di Donatello awards and three Nastri d’argento. In recognition of his extraordinary contribution to Italian cinema, in 1991 he was awarded a Golden Lion at Venice for career achievement.

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In the following years, he continued to turn out caustic social satires like Parenti serpenti (Dearest Relatives, Poisonous Relations, 1992) and Panni sporchi (Dirty Linen, 1999) and, in 2000, returned to the small screen with the popular miniseries Come quando fuori piove (Hens, Ducks, Chicken and Swine, 2000). He subsequently collaborated with a number of other committed filmmakers on the social documentary Un altro mondo è possibile (Another World Is Possible, 2001) before braving the desert sands at the age of 91 to direct his last film, Le rose del deserto (Roses of the Desert, 2006), a bittersweet satire about Italy’s invasion of Libya during World War II. MONTALDO, GIULIANO (1930–). Actor, screenwriter, and director. Montaldo began his film career as an actor, playing the role of a partisan leader in Carlo Lizzani’s Resistance drama Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951). While appearing in small roles in other films, he began working as assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo and Elio Petri and made a number of shorts before directing his first feature, Tiro al piccione (Pigeon Shoot, 1961). Adapted from a novel by Giose Rimanelli, the film caused controversy for what was seen as its unduly sympathetic treatment of those who had been foolish enough to embrace the Fascist cause in the 1920s. His next feature, however, Una bella grinta (The Reckless, 1965), the story of a ruthless social climber in an Italy riding the wave of the economic miracle, was more warmly received and was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin. After several other films, including the international crime action drama Ad ogni costo (Grand Slam, 1967) and Gli intoccabili (Machine Gun McCain, 1969), another gangster heist film shot in the United States and starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, Montaldo returned to more socially committed filmmaking with Sacco e Vanzetti (Sacco and Vanzetti, 1971), a powerful indictment of the legal execution of two Italian anarchists in the United States in 1927, which earned him the nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes. After a convincing portrait of the renowned Neapolitan Renaissance philosopher in Giordano Bruno (1973), Montaldo returned to engage with the theme of the Resistance again in L’Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die, 1976), his adaptation of Renata Viganò’s popular novel of the same name. In the early 1980s, he moved to television and spent two years preparing an epic and much-acclaimed miniseries on Marco Polo that was broadcast internationally, including in the United States, where it was nominated for eight Emmy Awards. Soon thereafter he was commissioned to direct a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at the Arena Theater of Verona, the success of which led him to divide his efforts between the stage and screen for the next two decades. He returned to the silver screen in 1987 with Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold Rimmed Glasses), an adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s elegiac novel, which won the Golden Osella at the Venice Festival

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for its elegant set and costume design. After a somewhat less successful attempt to adapt Ennio Flaiano’s novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1990), Montaldo edited hundreds of hours of the holdings of the Istituto LUCE in order to produce the stunning feature documentary Le stagioni dell’aquila (The Seasons of the Eagle, 1997). In 2001, while serving as president of RAI Cinema, he was awarded the Flaiano Prize for career achievement. After directing two other feature films in the new millennium, I demoni di San Pietroburgo (The Demons of St Petersburg, 2008) and L’industriale (The Industrialist, 2011), Montaldo has most recently returned to the other side of the camera, as the subject of Marco Spagnoli’s full-length documentary Giuliano Montaldo: Quatro volte vent’anni (Giuliano Montaldo: Four Times Twenty Years, 2012), and playing the lead role of Giorgio, an elderly poet suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in Francesco Bruni’s Tutto quello che vuoi (Everything You Want), 2017), for each of which he was awarded a Special Nastro d’argento. MONTELEONE, ENZO (1954–). Screenwriter and director. One of the most prominent of the younger generation of screenwriters to emerge during the 1980s, Monteleone scripted several films for Gabriele Salvatores, including Kamikazen, ultima notte a Milano (Kamikazen, Last Night in Milan, 1987) and the Oscar-winning Mediterraneo (1991). After also collaborating with Spanish director Carlos Saura on the screenplay of the revenge thriller ¡Dispara! (Outrage, 1993), he ventured into directing with La vera vita di Antonio H (The True Life of Antonio H, 1994), a clever self-reflexive film performed as one continuous monologue delivered by veteran actor Antonio Haber. This was followed by Ormai è fatta (Outlaw, 1999) and El Alamein (El Alamein: The Line of Fire, 2002), a powerful war film that won much critical acclaim but that was also attacked by conservative critics for its lessthan-heroic portrayal of Italian soldiers. He subsequently wrote and directed for television Il tunnel della libertà (The Tunnel of Freedom, 2004), the story of two Italians who heroically dig a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in 1961, and Il capo dei capi; Toto Riina e la scalata ai vertici di cosa nostra (The Boss of Bosses, 2007), a six-part miniseries on the ruthless Mafia boss, before returning to the big screen with Due partite (The Ladies Get Their Say, 2009), the relatively successful transposition of a stage play written by Cristina Comencini. In the last decade, he has worked mostly for television, writing and directing, among others, a two-part biopic on the life and misadventures of veteran Italian actor Walter Chiari (Walter Chiari—fino all’ultima risata, 2012) and Io non mi arrendo (I Won’t Give Up, 2016), a two-part miniseries on the

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struggle and ultimate death from cancer of Roberto Mancini, the police inspector who first attempted to bring to light the involvement of the Mafia in the illegal dumping of toxic waste in the countryside around Naples. MONTUORI, CARLO (1885–1968). Cinematographer. Active in the Italian film industry from its earliest days, Montuori began working as a camera operator in 1908 and, by 1912, had developed an improved system of arc lighting for filming indoors. His skills as a cinematographer received international recognition in 1925 when he helped film the American production of Ben-Hur, directed in Rome by Fred Niblo. He subsequently worked with many of the major Italian directors of the interwar period, including Alessandro Blasetti, for whom he photographed Sole (Sun, 1929), Resurrectio (Rebirth, 1931), and Terra madre (Earth Mother, 1931); Gennaro Righelli, with whom he made the aviation epic L’armata azzurra (The Blue Fleet, 1932); and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, for whom he created the remarkable expressionistic lighting of O la borsa o la vita (Your Money or Your Life, 1932). In the immediate postwar period, he collaborated with Luigi Zampa on Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947) and Anni difficili (Difficult Years, 1948), with Blasetti again on Altri tempi (Times Gone By, 1952), with Pietro Germi on Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1947) and La città si difende (Four Ways Out, 1951) and with Luigi Comencini on Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954, also known as Frisky). He is best remembered during this period, however, for his cinematography on the films of Vittorio De Sica, in particular Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), and Il tetto (The Roof, 1956). MORANTE, LAURA (1956–). Actress, director, and writer. Niece of novelist Elsa Morante, Laura Morante had originally nurtured ambitions to become a dancer. Having taken up a scholarship to study classical ballet, she discovered a greater attraction toward modern dance and so joined the experimental Danzatori Scalzi Group. In 1976, she was co-opted to act onstage by the iconoclastic actor-director Carmelo Bene, who required a ballerina for his theatrical spectacle, S.A.D.E. After several years of working in the theater, she began her film career with the small part of a young drug addict in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Oggetti smarriti (Lost and Found, 1980) before drawing more substantial roles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981) and Nanni Moretti’s Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams, 1981). Her breakthrough in cinema came with her assured performance in the title role of Moretti’s Bianca (1984), which earned her a first David di Donatello nomination for Best Actress.

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After marrying French actor Georges Claisse, Morante moved to Paris, where she continued to build a European reputation, appearing on Spanish television as the Dequesa de Alba in the miniseries Goya (1985) and in films by various other European directors, including João César Monteiro’s À Flor do Mar (Hovering over the Water, 1986) and Alain Tanner’s French-Swiss production La vallée fantôme (The Ghost Valley, 1987). She nevertheless maintained a presence on Italian screens, playing the role of Anita Garibaldi in the RAI miniseries Il generale (Garibaldi the General, 1987) and Laura, the Jewish wife of Enrico Fermi, in Gianni Amelio’s I ragazzi di via Panisperna (1988). Two years later, her moving performance as the distraught mother attempting to come to terms with her young son’s untimely death in Moretti’s La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001) saw her nominated for the European Film Awards and, in Italy, claiming the David di Donatello for Best Actress. She subsequently appeared as the dance teacher, Yolanda, in John Malkovich’s directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs (2002), before playing the radical 20th-century feminist writer Sibilla Aleramo in Michele Placido’s Un viaggio chiamato amore (A Scandalous Journey, 2002) and the insecure wife and aspiring actress in Gabriele Muccino’s Ricordati di me (Remember Me, 2003), a role that brought her a fourth Donatello nomination for Best Actress. Two years later, testifying to the international reputation she had achieved, the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored her with a three-day retrospective of her work to date. A year later, her performance in Alain Resnais’s Couers (Private Fears in Public Places, 2006) saw her receive the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Festival. Having demonstrated a certain propensity for incarnating insecure and even neurotic women on the screen, she was chosen by Pupi Avati to play the widow recovering from a nervous breakdown in his horror mystery thriller Il nascondiglio (The Hideout, 2007) before giving proof of her great range and versatility in being the all-tolerant wife and mother in Avati’s Il figlio più piccolo (The Youngest Son, 2009). In 2012, after appearing in more than 90 films and TV series, she moved behind the camera to direct herself in the French romantic comedy La cerise sur le gâteau (Cherry on the Cake, 2012), for which she was nominated for the David as Best Emerging Director. A year later, she returned briefly to the stage to play the wife, Corinne, in an Italian production of Martin Crimp’s The Country. After appearing as the retiring writer whose tranquil life comes to be severely disrupted in Peter Del Monte’s Nessuno mi pettina bene come il vento (No One Combs Me Like the Wind, 2014), she directed herself in her second feature, Assolo (Solo, 2016), a comedy in which an insecure divorcee and mother wrestles with reaching the milestone age of 50. Two years later, she revealed previously undisclosed talents as a writer in publishing her first book of short stories, Brividi immorali: Racconti e interludi (Immoral Thrills: Stories and

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Interludes, 2018). At the same time, she returned to the stage to play the character of Mira in Locandiera B&B, a modernization of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century comedy, directed by Roberto Andò. MORETTI, NANNI (1953–). Actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. For more than four decades, Moretti has engaged in a highly personal and defiantly independent form of filmmaking that has made him a unique figure in the panorama of contemporary Italian cinema. Born in Bolzano while his parents were on vacation, Moretti grew up in Rome and, during his teens, developed two passions: water polo and cinema. After active involvement in the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s, he bought a Super 8 camera and began making short films. That peculiar mix of the personal and the political, and a willingness to put himself on show, so characteristic of many of his later films, are already present in his first two shorts, La sconfitta (The Defeat, 1973) and Paté de bourgeois (1973). His truculent iconoclasm also surfaces early in Come parli, frate? (How Speak You, Brother?, 1974), an hour-long parody of Alessandro Manzoni’s canonical 19th-century novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), in which Moretti plays the evil Don Rodrigo, who, however, in this inverted version of the story, is the victim rather than the perpetrator of the story’s violence. Two years later, having found it impossible to make a feature film through the normal channels, Moretti self-financed Io sono un autarchico (I Am SelfSufficient, 1976), again adopting the Super 8 format. Featuring for the first time his alter ego persona Michele Apicella, played by Moretti himself, the film was an unexpected, and enormous, commercial success. After screening to packed houses for five consecutive months at the Filmstudio Cineclub in Rome, it was bought and broadcast by RAI state television and thus seen by literally millions of viewers. As a result, after the parenthesis of playing a small part in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre padrone (1977), Moretti directed his first feature, Ecce bombo (1978), a film that appeared, accurately and ironically, to be taking the pulse of a now directionless 1968 generation. It too proved to be an extraordinary commercial and critical success, winning a host of awards and confirming Moretti’s status as one of Italy’s most distinctive young auteurs. Nevertheless, it would be three years before he would make his next film, Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams, 1981). Using Moretti’s now regular alter ego, Michele Apicella, Sogni d’oro dramatized something of a creative crisis not unlike Federico Fellini’s 8½, while also carrying out a playful critique of Sigmund Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis. However, despite the critical acclaim it received that year at the Venice Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and a special commendation, it did very poorly at the box office. Unperturbed, Moretti brought Apicella back as a high school teacher in Bian-

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ca (Sweet Body of Bianca, 1984), a typically eccentric take on the murder thriller, and then as a young but disillusioned Catholic priest in La messa è finita (The Mass Is Ended, 1985), the latter winning both the Silver Bear and the International Confederation of Art Cinemas Prize at Berlin. In 1987, with his artistic reputation firmly established, Moretti took a further step toward independence by founding his own production company, Sacher Film, with which he produced the debut films of two promising young directors, Carlo Mazzacurati’s Notte italiana (Italian Night, 1987) and Daniele Luchetti’s Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow, 1988). His own next film, Palombella rossa (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989), made in a period when the Italian Communist Party appeared to be in terminal decline, was a hilarious reflection on the crisis afflicting the party carried out through the stratagem of a long-running water polo competition. This was followed by a more serious examination of the Communist Party and its future prospects in the one-hour documentary La cosa (The Thing, 1990). Having by this time become a mentor for many of the younger directors forming part of the so-called New Italian Cinema, Moretti next produced and acted in Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), giving one of his most memorable performances as the cynical and smug Socialist minister Cesare Botero. The personal dimension of Moretti’s cinema reached a new level in what many still regard as his most perfect film, Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), where the Apicella persona is dispensed with altogether and the film is recounted simply as a series of diary entries in the first person. Critically acclaimed and widely distributed, the film finally brought Moretti well-deserved international recognition. After producing and acting in Mimmo Calopresti’s La seconda volta (The Second Time, 1995), Moretti returned to the diary form in Aprile (April, 1998), a bright film that celebrated the birth of his son but in the context of a more general consternation at the electoral victory in Italy of the center-right forces led by Silvio Berlusconi. Contrasting sharply with many of his other films but stunning in its expressive intensity, Moretti’s next film, La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001), left politics to the side in order to examine the effect of the abrupt death of a teenage son on a well-to-do Italian family, with Moretti himself playing the role of the father. The film was showered with numerous awards, including the International Film Critics Prize and the Palme d’or at Cannes, as well as the David di Donatello and a Nastro d’argento at home. The personal and the political blended again in Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), the amusing recounting of an ill-fated attempt to make a fictional film about a wily entrepreneur and politician with all the features of Silvio Berlusconi. There followed a full-frontal but far from malicious satire of the Vatican in Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope, 2011) and then a return to undisguised autobiography with Mia madre (My Mother, 2015). His most recent film has been Santiago, Italia (2018), an 80-minute documentary recounting

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the previously little-known humanitarian role that the Italian embassy played in Chile in 1972, defending and sheltering people at risk during the bloody coup that established the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In 2019, the film was awarded the year’s Nastro d’argento.

Nanni Moretti directing. Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

MORRICONE, ENNIO (1928–2020). Musician, orchestra director, composer, and film composer. Arguably the greatest, certainly the most prolific, screen composer in the history of cinema, Morricone penned the scores of more than 500 films and television series, in addition to more than 1,000 other musical compositions, including sonatas, symphonies, chamber pieces, music for theatrical productions, radio plays, and arrangements of popular songs. By his own account, Morricone had already begun to master the trumpet and to compose rudimentary hunting themes in the style of Weber by the age of six. He then embarked on formal musical training at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, which he entered at the age of 12 and where he studied trumpet, orchestration, choral music, and composition under renowned Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi. While completing his academic studies, he also played second trumpet in the musical ensemble of Alberto Flamini. Having earned his diploma in trumpet in 1946, he began experimenting with compositions for piano and voice while also writing music for theatrical productions. In the early 1950s, he expanded his activities to include writing music for radio plays while continuing to experiment with

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original compositions and avant-garde music. By the late 1950s, he was working as a musical arranger for RAI television while conducting and arranging popular songs for performers such as Gianni Morandi, Charles Aznavour, and Mario Lanza. He began composing for films in the early 1960s, with a score for Luciano Salce’s Il federale (The Fascist, 1961). His first resounding success, however, came with the innovative musical track he created for Sergio Leone’s groundbreaking Spaghetti Western Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), which he had written under the pseudonym Don Savio and for which he received his first Nastro d’argento. He subsequently scored all of Leone’s films, including the gangster epic Once upon a Time in America (1984), and worked with all the major Italian directors from Gillo Pontecorvo and Marco Bellocchio to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. Indeed, as Bertolucci himself once remarked in an interview, there was a period during the 1970s when practically no Italian film, with the possible exception of those of Federico Fellini, appeared without the name of Morricone in its credits. Although he had previously also worked with American and British directors on films as different as John Boorman’s Exorcist II (1977) and Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), for which he had received his first Oscar nomination, Morricone became especially well known in America for his haunting and moving soundtrack to Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), a score that earned him his second Oscar nomination as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award. He then went on to work on a multitude of other international films, including Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), and Pedro Almodóvar’s ¡Atame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1990), as well as further contributing to Italian cinema with the scores of films such as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) and Roberto Faenza’s Jona che visse nella balena (Jonah Who Lived in the Whale, 1993), for which he received his fourth David di Donatello. In subsequent years, his prolific output remained matched only by its extraordinary variety as he continued to move freely between art house and popular cinema, from horror thrillers like Dario Argento’s Il sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996) to an American satirical comedy like Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998), whose score earned him yet another Grammy nomination. From the beginning of the 1990s, he was also particularly active on Italian television, writing everything from the music for the never-ending series on the Mafia, La piovra (Octopus), to scoring the hagiographic telefilm Padre Pio, tra cielo e terra (Father Pio, between Heaven and Earth, 2000).

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Ennio Morricone with his Oscar for Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight at the 88th Annual Academy Awards, February 2016. Courtesy of Photofest.

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After having been nominated five times but never winning competitively, in 2007 he was finally recognized with an Honorary Oscar, awarded "For his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music." By this time, he had also begun to tour extensively, conducting before sell-out crowds in many of the major international concert halls. Ironically, although this was finally the opportunity to perform the "serious" music that he had continued to write but not been able to showcase in all the years that he had devoted to the cinema, his most successful and acclaimed concerts were those where he conducted the music of his most popular film scores. In 2015, bowing to the entreaties of an insistent Quentin Tarantino, he scored his last Western, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, for which he was finally awarded the Oscar for Best Original Score. Perhaps musically not quite at the level of his greatest work, it nevertheless seemed to crown an extraordinary career. A year later, he also received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Although he had often been asked to name his favorite film score, he had always refused to place one of his "children" above any of the others. However, in accordance with his own stated wishes, at the small, private funeral, which he had expressly requested and was attended only by his close family and by friend and director, Giuseppe Tornatore, the music played as the casket was being farewelled was from the unmistakable score he had composed for The Mission. MUCCINO, GABRIELE (1967–). Director and screenwriter. After serving an apprenticeship as assistant to directors Pupi Avati and Marco Risi, Muccino enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and studied screenwriting with Leonardo Benvenuti. He made several short features for RAI television before directing Ecco fatto (That’s It, 1998), a frothy generational comedy that received the nomination for the Prize of the City at the Turin International Festival of Young Cinema. His second feature, Come te nessuno mai (But Forever in My Mind, 1999), a portrayal of the trials and tribulations of adolescence in an Italy on the threshold of the new millennium, was also well received and nominated for the Grand Prix at the Paris Film Festival. His greatest first commercial and critical success, however, came with L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss, 2001), another engaging generational comedy that was nominated for 10 David di Donatello awards, in the event winning five, as well as three Silver Ribbons. The film also became a huge international hit, receiving the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and rated among the top 10 films of the year by the American Entertainment Weekly. Muccino’s next feature, Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love, 2003), a portrait of the contemporary Italian family in crisis, was similarly acclaimed, if less commercially successful, prompting a number of offers to work in Hollywood, where Muccino directed two big-budget

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features starring American superstar Will Smith: The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), which earned Smith an Oscar nomination and Muccino a Special Nastro d’argento, and the slightly less successful Seven Pounds (2008). At the same time, in what was, perhaps, Hollywood’s ultimate accolade, Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio was remade in the United States as The Last Kiss (2006), directed by Tony Goldwyn. Muccino returned to Italy to write and direct Baciami ancora (Kiss Me Again, 2010), a revisiting of the state of the couples of L’ultimo bacio 10 years later. Two years later, he was again in Hollywood making Playing for Keeps (2012), a romantic comedy starring Gerard Butler and Jessica Biel, and Fathers and Daughters (2015), a family drama starring Russell Crowe as a novelist and widower struggling to raise his daughter in the wake of a nervous breakdown. A year later, he brought Italians and Americans together in L’estate addosso (Summertime, 2016), a contemporary road movie in which a young Italian couple go on a road trip with two young American gays, prompting the emergence of a host of cultural differences. While the film elicited quite a tepid reception in America, in Italy it received the Hamilton Award when it premiered at Venice. Back in Italy, Muccino returned to top form directing an all-star cast in A casa tutti bene (There Is No Place Like Home, 2018), a busy dramedy in which the members of a large extended family all return to their island home in order to celebrate their parents’ golden wedding anniversary. A fine ensemble performance by a who’s who of contemporary Italian cinema, the film was awarded the first Spectator David di Donatello and a Special Nastro d’argento for the entire cast. MUNZI, FRANCESCO (1969–). Director and writer. One of the most promising of the new generation of directors to have emerged in the new millennium, Munzi graduated in political science from La Sapienza University in Rome before enrolling to study directing at the Centro Nazionale di Cinematografia. After a number of short films, including the documentary Nastassia (1996) and Giacomo e Luo Ma (1999), both exploring the experience of recent immigrants attempting to integrate into Italian life, he made his feature debut with Saimir (2004), a moving but unsentimental coming-ofage narrative in which an Albanian teenager, having grown up helping his widowed father smuggle illegal immigrants into southern Italy, comes to be confronted with the necessity of a making a difficult moral choice. Premiering at the Venice Festival, the film received the De Laurentiis Award Special Mention, and Munzi was subsequently awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best Emerging Director. It was followed by Il resto della notte (The Rest of the Night, 2008), a taut thriller, again set within the context of the recent foreign immigration to Italy, which won the International Confederation of Art Cinemas Award when it screened at Cannes. Munzi achieved his greatest critical success to date, however, with Anime nere (Black Souls, 2014), a

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powerful family drama that develops into a tragedy of almost Shakespearean dimensions when the older of the three brothers of a Calabrian ndrangheta family involved in international drug running decides to withdraw to become a shepherd in their native village while his son wants to join his uncles in their criminal activities. The film received a 13-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Venice, winning four awards, including the Pasinetti Prize for Best Film and the Schermi di Qualità Award. It was subsequently nominated for the David di Donatello in 15 categories, in the event winning nine, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. In 2016, Munzi returned to nonfiction with Assalto al cielo (Storming the Heavens), a fulllength documentary using archive materials to recount the passionate idealism that animated the 1968 student movement and its embrace of revolution to bring about a more just society. At the same time, a report in the trade paper Variety suggested that Munzi was being headhunted by American producer Jeff Rabovov in order to direct an underworld crime thriller set in the New York docks. More recently, however, Munzi has collaborated with writer Niccolò Ammaniti to codirect Il miracolo (The Miracle, 2018). An eight-part television series, scripted by Ammaniti and produced by Sky Atlantic, it charts the discovery of a small plastic statue of the Virgin Mary (which incessantly cries tears of human blood) and the effects the statue has on a number of individuals, beginning with a prime minister about to take the country to a referendum on whether Italy will leave or remain in the European Union. See also EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION. MUTI, ORNELLA (1955–). Actress. The younger of two sisters born to a Neapolitan journalist and an Estonian sculptress, Muti (birth name Francesca Romana Rivelli) nurtured early hopes of becoming either a nuclear physicist or a translator. Her intentions were foiled, however, when, not quite 15 years old, her stunning looks induced director Damiano Damiani to offer her the leading role in his Mafia saga La moglie più bella (The Most Beautiful Wife, 1970). With no previous training or experience, she displayed noticeable talent in playing a role that alluded to the real-life case of Franca Viola, a young Sicilian girl who a few years earlier had courageously made history by defying the Mafia and local customs in refusing to marry the young Mafia boss who had forcibly kidnapped and raped her. By his own account, it was Damiani who suggested the stage name, which Muti then retained as she quickly established herself as the erotic drawing card of much Italian and Spanish cinema of the 1970s. Indeed, after playing the young female lead in Giorgio Stegani’s teen romance Il sole nella pelle (Summer Affair, 1971) and Umberto Lenzi’s horror thriller Un posto ideale per uccidere (An Ideal Place to Kill, 1971), she moved to Spain, where she became one of the rising young starlets of the Spanish screen in films such as Pedro Maso’s Experien-

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cia prematrimonial (Premarital Experience, 1972) and Claudio Guerin’s La casa de las palomas (The House of the Doves, 1972), in which she shared top billing with no less than Lucia Bosè. Returning to Italy she appeared in many films that exploited, above all, her physical beauty and her erotic appeal as in Marco Vicario’s Paolo il caldo (The Sensuous Sicilian, 1973) and Gian Luigi Calderone’s Appassionata (1974). But she was soon also working with established auteurs like Mario Monicelli and Dino Risi, although her dramatic acting skills came particularly to the fore in the three films she made with Marco Ferreri: L’ultima donna (The Last Woman, 1976), for which she received a nomination for the Nastro d’argento as Best Actress; Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1981), for which she was nominated for the David di Donatello; and Il futuro è donna (The Future Is Woman, 1984). At the beginning of the 1980s, producer Dino De Laurentiis attempted to launch her on a film career in Hollywood by having her play Princess Aura in the big-budget Flash Gordon (1980), but the attempt, like the film as a whole, largely failed and, although she lived in America for the next five years, her career was better served by the films she continued to return to make in Italy, including the two films in which she starred opposite popular singer Adriano Celentano, Il bisbetico domato (The Taming of the Scoundrel, 1980) and Innamorato pazzo (Madly in Love, 1981), and the real penchant for comedy she was able to display playing opposite Paolo Villaggio in Steno’s Bonnie and Clyde all’italiana (Bonnie and Clyde Italian Style, 1982). Having returned to Italy in the mid-1980s, and while attempting to deal with a great deal of turmoil in her private life, she nevertheless supplied a fine performance in Francesco Rosi’s Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987) before being the obstreperous sister in Carlo Verdone’s Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I, 1987), a role that brought her both the Nastro d’argento and the Italian Golden Globe for Best Actress. A year later, her courageous and compelling performance as the abandoned Anna, who holds the screen alone for 90 minutes in Francesco Maselli’s Codice privato (Secret Access, 1988), earned her a second Nastro d’argento for Best Actress as well as the prestigious Pasinetti Award at the Venice Festival that year. In the 1990s, she was again with Verdone in Stasera a casa di Alice (Tonight at Alice’s, 1990) before retesting the Hollywood waters by playing the Italian wife of American gangster Angelo Provolone in John Landis’s ill-fated Oscar (1991), a film remembered only for being Sylvester Stallone’s one attempt at comedy. Back in Europe two years later, she re-embraced the sex siren role in Vicente Aranda’s El amante bilingue (The Bilingual Lover, 1993) but was soon working mostly on television. After appearing in the RAI’s two-part biopic of legendary cyclist Fausto Coppi, Il grande Fausto (The Price of Victory, 1995), and in the popular courtroom miniseries L’avvocato Porta (1997), she returned to the big screen

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in a modest supporting role in Monicelli’s Panni sporchi (Dirty Linen, 1998). In the early years of the new millennium, she found herself for the first time working with a number of female directors, with Francesca Archibugi in Domani (Tomorrow, 2001); with fellow actress Eleonora Giorgi in her directorial debut, Uomini & donne, amori & bugie (Love, Lies, Kids . . . and Dogs, 2003); and with Asia Argento in Ingannevole è il cuore più di ogni cosa (The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things, 2004). At the same time, however, she provided a splendid performance as the charming, if enigmatic, Mathilde Figura, in Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1, The Moab Story (2003); Part 2: Vaux to the Sea; Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004). She subsequently appeared for the most part in television miniseries and films made for television, although she returned to the big screen, if only in a brief cameo, as the fictional actress Pia Fusari in Woody Allen’s From Rome with Love (2010). After having fallen out of sight for a number of years, Muti came back to public notice in 2015 when an Italian court sentenced her to eight months in jail or a fine of 30,000 euros for having in 2010 supplied a fraudulent doctor’s certificate justifying her failure to perform in a play in the Verdi Theater at Pordenone, for which she had already been paid, when on the same day she had been photographed attending a charity dinner in St. Petersburg hosted by Vladimir Putin. Two years later, the Appeals Court confirmed the offence but reduced the sentence to a six-month suspended prison term and a 50,000 euro fine. The sentence arrived only a few days after the actress and her family had been evicted from their rented house in Rome due to nonpayment of a debt. Nevertheless, a year later, she returned in fine form to the big screen in Wine to love—i colori dell’amore (2018), a romantic comedy set in the wine region of Basilicata in which she played a former model at the center of a love triangle.

N NASCIMBENE, MARIO (1913–2002). Musical director and composer. One of the most respected and most versatile of Italian film composers, Nascimbene is credited with the musical scores of more than 130 films and TV series. After graduating from the Conservatory of Milan in 1935, and while composing symphonic works and chamber music, he indulged an early passion for cinema by scoring Ferdinando Maria Poggioli’s L’amore canta (Love Song, 1941). In the immediate postwar period, he increased his involvement in the cinema, working with many directors on a wide variety of films ranging from socially committed Neorealist works such as Giuseppe De Santis’s Roma ore 11 (Rome 11:00, 1952) to peplums like Carmine Gallone’s Cartagine in fiamme (Carthage in Flames, 1960). He scored a number of films for Valerio Zurlini, beginning with Estate violenta (Violent Summer, 1959), for which he received the Nastro d’argento, and he also collaborated with Franco Brusati on Il disordine (Disorder, 1962) and Carlo Lizzani on Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial, 1963). In the late 1960s, he initiated a long and fruitful partnership with Roberto Rossellini, scoring many of his films for television including Atti degli Apostoli (Acts of the Apostles, 1969), Socrate (Socrates, 1971), Blaise Pascal (1972), Agostino d’Ippona (Augustine of Hippo, 1972), and Cartesius (Descartes, 1974) as well as Rossellini’s last work for the big screen, Il Messia (The Messiah, 1975). One of the few Italian film composers to have worked extensively in Hollywood, Nascimbene also scored dozens of big-budget American productions, among them Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and The Quiet American (1958), Robert Rossen’s Alexander the Great (1956), Charles Vidor’s A Farewell to Arms (1957), and King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba (1959). Having already received the Nastro d’argento three times, in 1992 he was given a Special David di Donatello for his entire career. After his death in 2002, an annual prize was instituted in his name to encourage and recognize other up-and-coming film composers.

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NASTRO D’ARGENTO. Award. Meaning, literally, “Silver Ribbon,” the Nastro d’argento is a prestigious award conferred annually by the Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani (SNGCI; National Union of Italian Film Journalists). Award of the Nastri is decided by a general vote of all union members addressing short lists of five names prepared by the union’s steering committee. The award was instituted in 1946 when the Ribbon for Best Film went to Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Best Direction was shared between Vittorio De Sica for Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and Alessandro Blasetti for Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946). Originally the award ceremony alternated between Rome and the Sicilian city of Taormina (and sometimes Florence), but currently the announcement of the short-listed candidates takes place at the end of May in Rome at the MAXXI (National Museum of 21st- Century Art) while the award of the prizes takes place in late July in the Ancient Theatre of Taormina. The Nastri are specifically intended to acknowledge and reward the achievement of Italians in the national film industry, although one of the 16 ribbons is reserved for the Best Foreign Film of the year and one for Best European Production. The other categories include Best Director, Best Film, Best Emerging Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Song, and Best Dubbing of a Foreign Film. The SNGCI now also holds two separate and dedicated ceremonies for the award of the prizes to films in the Documentary and Short Film categories, usually presented in Rome in late February and March. From year to year, other Special Nastri may be awarded. The award ceremony in Taormina currently also hosts the conferring of the Gugliemo Biraghi award for Best Emerging Actor/Actress and the Premio Nino Manfredi for Best Comic Actor of the year. In 2013, the Hamilton behind the Camera—Nastro d’argento Award was introduced to recognize major career achievements. (A full listing of winners in the major categories is given in the appendix.) NAZZARI, AMEDEO (1907–1979). Actor. Born in Cagliari, Sardinia, as Salvatore Amedeo Buffa, Nazzari had already distinguished himself as a stage actor before moving to films in the mid-1930s. Tall and handsome, and frequently compared in bearing and looks to Errol Flynn, he was often cast in the role of the courageous and principled adventurer with a big heart. His first important role was as the self-sacrificing young cavalry officer in Goffredo Alessandrini’s 19th-century costume drama Cavalleria (Cavalry, 1936), which was followed by the similarly heroic self-sacrificing father in Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1939), also directed by Alessandrini. More dashing but also more villainous was the role of Neri Chiaramontesi that Nazzari played in Alessandro Blasetti’s La cena delle beffe (The

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Jester’s Supper, 1942), although the part allowed Nazzari to rip off Clara Calamai’s bodice in order to expose the first naked bosom in Italian cinema history. After the war, Nazzari starred in a number of Neorealist films including Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946), where he played a war veteran forced by circumstances to become a criminal, and Blasetti’s Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946), where he was the leader of a group of partisans who take refuge in a convent, resulting in tragedy when the Germans return and take their reprisal. Despite appearing in a wide variety of films during this period, he came to be characterized by the wholesome figure he cut in a series of weepy melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, which included Catene (Chains, 1950), Figli di nessuno (Nobody’s Children, 1951), and L’angelo bianco (The White Angel, 1955). In 1957, with typical whimsy, Federico Fellini enticed him to play Alberto Lazzari, an aging and veteran film star much like himself, in Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). Nazzari continued to work both in Italy and abroad throughout the 1960s, appearing memorably as the Italian émigré become wealthy Argentinian cattle baron in Dino Risi’s Il gaucho (The Gaucho, 1964). As time went on, however, he came to be cast mostly in minor supporting roles, often in B-grade crime films. Fittingly, perhaps, his final appearance was in the glaringly titled Melodrammore (1978), a parody of film melodramas written and directed by Maurizio Costanzo, in which Nazzari played himself giving lessons to a younger actor on how to do melodrama. NEGRONI, BALDASSARE (1877–1948). Director. Descended from a noble Roman family and bearing the title of count, Negroni studied law and worked in finance until 1911 when he joined the Cines studios, first as cameraman and then as a scriptwriter. In 1912, together with Gioacchino Mecheri, he founded the Celio Film Company, for which he directed a series of elegant melodramas featuring Francesca Bertini, Alberto Colla, and Emilio Ghione. After making four films starring Hesperia, a diva with whom he would work extensively and then marry in 1923, he codirected (with Gustavo Serena) the much-acclaimed musical pantomime Histoire d’un Pierrot (Pierrot, the Prodigal, 1914). He subsequently transferred to Milano Films, where he directed Hesperia in another dozen films, including a version of La signora delle camelie (The Lady of the Camelias, 1915). After being part of the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union) in the early 1920s, Negroni joined the Stefano Pittaluga company, for which he directed, among others, Il vetturale di Moncenisio (The Courier of Moncenisio, 1927) and Giuditta e Oloferne (Judith and Holofernes, 1928), both of which starred Bartolomeo Pagano (Maciste) in two of his last roles.

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From the early 1930s, Negroni worked mostly as production manager; the last film he produced was Mario Mattoli’s La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945). NEOREALISM. The most celebrated movement in the history of Italian cinema, Neorealism was in fact always more of a common socially committed approach to filmmaking embraced by a number of directors in the immediate postwar period than a structured artistic movement. Nevertheless, while its formal status as a movement has long been questioned and its precise nature, extent, and defining characteristics have continued to be debated, there has never been any doubt about Neorealism’s crucial role in the revival of the Italian cinema in the immediate postwar period. Since what came to be regarded as Neorealist films were created more from a spontaneous desire to use cinema to engage with social reality rather than to follow the dictates of a manifesto or a set of rules, the precise features of Neorealist cinema have always proved difficult to define. However, at least some of the elements that characterized this new cinema, which in its turn to reality implicitly sought to reverse two decades of Fascist mystification and evasion, were the following: a stronger sense of realism, a focus on the everyday life of ordinary people, an attitude of social commitment and human solidarity, and the use of quasi-documentary techniques, nonprofessional actors, on-location shooting, natural lighting, long takes, and unobtrusive editing. The three directors most closely associated with the movement and widely regarded as its founding fathers and most representative figures were Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti. Rossellini, in particular, having already directed three relatively realistic films during the Fascist period, is considered to have founded Neorealism proper with Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945, also known as Open City), subsequently consolidating this new approach to filmmaking with the two other films of his so-called war trilogy, Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Germania anna zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947). De Sica, whose earlier I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944) would often be hailed as a forerunner to the full-fledged Neorealism of the postwar period, created, in partnership with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, what are regarded as three of the movement’s key films: Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Umberto D. (1952). Luchino Visconti, whose first film, Ossessione (1943), is canonically cited as the movement’s most immediate precursor, offered what was perhaps the purest possible version of Neorealism in La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). A loose adaptation of Giovanni Verga’s 19th-century novel I Malavoglia, it was filmed entirely on location in a small Sicilian fishing village, and employed only the local

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people as actors and all speaking in their own dialect. Unfortunately, even if now regarded as one of the movement’s most exemplary films, La terra trema was also the least successful at the box office. Among the other directors most closely associated with the movement in the immediate postwar period were Giuseppe De Santis, Luigi Zampa, Aldo Vergano, Pietro Germi, and Renato Castellani. However, even such celebrated Neorealist films as De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and Germi’s In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1948) have often been seen by historians of the movement as already moving away from the social concerns of “pure” Neorealism toward a more entertaining cinema of genre and spectacle, inaugurating what would later come to be known pejoratively as “pink” or “rosy” Neorealism. Other historians suggest, however, that it might be more accurate to talk of “Neorealisms” in the plural and to see these directors and others, at least in their films of the immediate postwar period, as all creating their own valid versions of a cinema engaging with its surrounding reality rather than striving to evade it. It is instructive to note, however, that while Italian Neorealism was universally honored as an artistic movement and internationally acclaimed, in Italy itself Neorealist films only ever formed a very small part of national production and exhibition. Furthermore, although they were critically praised at home and abroad, Neorealist films were not particularly popular either with the Italian authorities, who objected to the poor image of Italy generally presented, or with Italian audiences, who showed a distinct preference for the entertaining melodramas and action-adventures being turned out by the more commercially oriented film industry. Consequently, while the ethical approach and the technical innovations that Neorealism had introduced in its short flowering would continue to influence filmmakers for many years to come—indeed one film historian has recently characterized Neorealism as the superego of subsequent Italian cinema—it is generally agreed that by the early 1950s the movement itself had already passed into history. NERO, FRANCO (1941–). Actor. Abandoning a university degree in economics, Franco Nero, born Francesco Sparanero, studied acting at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan before moving to Rome to make his screen debut in a small role in Giuseppe Fina’s Pelle viva (Scorched Skin, 1962). He was soon appearing in a wide variety of films, from B-graders like Antonio Margheriti’s I diafanoidi vengono da marte (The War of the Planets, 1966) to art films like Carlo Lizzani’s La Celestina (1965) and Antonio Pietrangeli’s Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1966). He first really made his mark in what would remain one of his best remembered roles, as the deadly coffindragging tongue-in-cheek gunslinger of Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django (1966). He subsequently played Abel in John Huston’s production of The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), and his rugged good looks and

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flashing blue eyes made him a natural choice for the part of Lancelot in Joshua Logan’s Camelot (1967). While filming Camelot he met English actress Vanessa Redgrave, who became his long-term partner and with whom he would have a son, Carlo Gabriel. A year later, with a growing international reputation, he received the David di Donatello for his interpretation of Captain Bellodi in Damiano Damiani’s adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia’s Mafia novel Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1968). Nero continued to appear in a host of films in the 1970s, alternating with ease between Italian and foreign productions, and between popular genre and auteur cinema. Alongside Westerns like Viva la muerte . . . tua! (Don’t Turn the Other Cheek, 1971) and polizieschi like Confessioni di un commissario della polizia al procuratore della repubblica (Confessions of a Police Captain, 1971), he also appeared in Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970) and played the ill-fated Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in Florestano Vancini’s Il delitto Matteotti (The Assassination of Matteotti, 1973). For the next two decades, he continued to exhibit an enormous versatility as he moved between international action thrillers like Enter the Ninja (1981) and Die Hard 2 (1990) and auteur films like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) and Pupi Avati’s Fratelli e sorelle (Brothers and Sisters, 1992). The 1990s, however, saw him less on the big screen and more on European television, featuring in everything from German telefilms such as Das Babylon Komplott (The Babylon Conspiracy, 1993) to Italian miniseries such as Desideria e l’anello del drago (The Dragon Ring, 1994). In 2003, after appearing in almost 150 films, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Milano Film Festival. Still much in demand as an actor, he also tried his hand at producing and directing in Forever Blues (2005), a much-praised effort that was awarded the Fregene Fellini Prize for direction. He has since appeared in more than 50 other films, shorts, and television series. A highlight for a cult following that has trailed him since his days as the gunslinger Django was his cameo in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). Plans have since been unveiled for the veteran actor to reprise both his Western roles as Django and Keoma in a Django Lives and a Keoma Rises, both reported to be already in preproduction. NEW ITALIAN CINEMA. New Italian Cinema was a rubric that came to be used ever more frequently from the mid-1990s onward to characterize what was widely seen as a resurgence of creative energies after the period of relative stagnation that had followed the crisis of the film industry in the mid1970s. Although the expression had been used earlier in a tentative way to indicate the work of a number of younger filmmakers who had made their debut in the early 1980s, it was the overwhelming success of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) in winning both the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best

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Foreign Film that appeared to set the seal on the return of Italian cinema to the world stage. Soon after, the similar international success of Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991) and Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992) confirmed that Italy was indeed producing a new generation of world-class filmmakers who were, in fact, creating a new Italian cinema. Although the signs of this renaissance were undeniable, the precise features of the new cinema continued to prove difficult to define. The many directors who came to be grouped under its umbrella title—Nanni Moretti, Maurizio Nichetti, Mario Martone, Francesca Archibugi, Silvio Soldini, Carlo Mazzacurati, and others—were of widely varying ages and backgrounds, and their films often seemed to have little in common with each other. Nevertheless, even if they displayed no common ethical or political vision or any shared aesthetic project, these films all appeared to be responding in their own particular way to the more complicated and fragmented social reality around them, to an Italy where the old political ideologies had crumbled and with them a great part of all the previous certainties. The early films of Salvatores in particular voiced the profound disillusionment of the now-adult members of a 1968 generation who continued to dream of flight from that intolerable society that they had so fiercely contested but into which they had ultimately become firmly integrated. Other films such as Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Forever Mary, 1989), Aurelio Grimaldi’s La ribelle (The Rebel, 1993), and Antonio Capuano’s remarkable first film, Vito e gli altri (Vito and the Others, 1991), attempted to report in an honest and almost dispassionate way the institutionalized marginalization and the social degradation of the big Italian cities, especially as they affected the younger generation, without, however, being able to propose any solutions. Amelio’s own Il ladro di bambini, one of the high points of this new cinema, successfully renewed the aesthetic paradigm of Neorealism while at the same time recording the defeat of its aspirations to social justice and human solidarity. On the other hand, Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991) was able to use caricature to present a fictional portrait of the inbred corruption that had become such a regular feature of Italian political life and that, only a year later, the Mani pulite (Clean Hands) investigations would confirm in detail. Although the New Italian Cinema appeared to have no center—indeed, a dislocation away from the traditional center of Rome was a characteristic feature of many of these films—Nanni Moretti came to be one of its major points of reference not only for his eccentric and always independent filmmaking but also for his willingness to act in the films of other younger directors. More important, his initiative in setting up his independent production and distribution company, Sacher Film, allowed him to exercise complete control over his own work as well as to facilitate the entry into the

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industry of other promising young directors. The founding of other small but solid independent production companies in the late 1980s, such as Salvatores’s Colorado Film and Domenico Procacci’s Fandango, also helped construct a firm financial basis for the new cinema, leading to a proliferation of films by both established and new directors in the late 1990s. Although the usefulness of the tag New Italian Cinema came to be questioned in the early years of the new millennium, the three Oscars awarded to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997) and the Palme d’or at Cannes for Moretti’s La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001) remained as clear signs that Italian cinema had indeed gone through a renaissance and had emerged into what now could simply be called the cinema of the new millennium.

A scene from Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), the flagship film of the New Italian Cinema. Courtesy of Photofest.

NICHETTI, MAURIZIO (1948–). Actor, director, and animator. An architecture graduate with a background in mime, Nichetti joined the Bruno Bozzetto Film company in the early 1970s, working as a cartoonist and animator, and appearing as the harried animator in Bozzetto’s charming liveaction animated feature Allegro non troppo (1977). Having founded the independent mime school Quellidigrok in 1974, he left the Bozzetto company in 1978 in order to make his first independent feature film, Rataplan (1979), an almost silent comedy that received high praise at the Venice Festival and was hugely successful at the box office. This was followed by Ho fatto splash (I Made a Splash, 1980), an amusing variation of the Rip Van Winkle

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theme in which a boy, played by Nichetti himself, wakes up after a 20-year sleep and finds himself needing to adapt to contemporary society. Two years later, Domani si balla (Tomorrow We Dance, 1982), again starring Nichetti himself, was part tribute to Georges Méliès and part satire on the television industry and, moreover, showcased Mariangela Melato’s considerable talents as a dancer. After a variety of other shorts and extensive television work, Nichetti founded his own film production company, Bambu, to make Ladri di saponette (Icicle Thieves, 1989), a playful homage to Vittorio De Sica’s Neorealist classic, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), but done as another satire on television and the encroachment of advertising on the small screen. The film attracted critical praise with Nichetti winning his second Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story. There followed a host of internationally acclaimed films that mixed animation and live action: Volere Volare (To Want to Fly, 1991), the amusing trials of a man turning into a cartoon character, which was awarded a David di Donatello for its screenplay; Stefano Quantestorie (1993), in which a young man of the 1960s lives out a number of possible alternative lives; and Luna e l’altra (Luna and the Other, 1996), where shadows live out independent existences. He subsequently widened his artistic activities to include directing opera and lyric theater, beginning with a much-praised production of Gioacchino Rossini’s Barber of Seville at Trento in 1999. In the new millennium, he wrote and directed himself in only one feature film, Honolulu Baby (2001), but continued to be productive over a wide range of activities, including creating a 30-episode series for RAI television titled Mammamia! (2003–2004); directing a stage adaptation of Aldo Palazzeschi’s novel, Le sorelle Materassi, at the Teatro Politeama Pratese (2005); and teaching courses in writing for film and television at Milan’s Università Cattolica. From 2005 to 2010, he served as artistic director of the Trento Film Festival and, since 2014, has served as artistic director of the Milan branch of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. After the made-fortelevision live-action Agata e Ulisse (Agatha and Ulysses, 2010), his most recent animated feature, still in production, is Francesco: Una vita in viaggio fra cielo e terra (Francesco: A Life between Heaven and Earth). Nichetti maintains an interactive home page at http://www.maurizionichetti.it. NINCHI, AVE (1915–1997). Actress. After studying at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, Ninchi distinguished herself working with a number of important theater companies. She moved to the cinema in the immediate postwar period with small parts in films such as Guido Brignone’s Canto, ma sottovoce . . . (I’m Singing but Quietly, 1945) and Carmine Gallone’s Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, 1946). She began taking on more substantial roles in Alberto Lattuada’s Il delitto di

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Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender, 1947) and Luigi Zampa’s Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947), for which she received a Nastro d’argento for best supporting female interpretation. Although undoubtedly a talented dramatic actress, in the 1950s she was most often seen in comedies, among them Aldo Fabrizi’s La famiglia Passaguai (The Passaguai Family, 1951) and its two sequels, Pietro Germi’s La presidentessa (Mademoiselle Gobete, 1952), and many of the Totò films, including Totò cerca moglie (Totò Looks for a Wife, 1950), Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), Totò e le donne (Totò and the Women, 1952), and Totò cerca pace (Totò Wants Peace, 1954). During the 1960s, while not abandoning screen comedy, she moved progressively more toward television, appearing not only in a number of serials, telefilms, and a famous advertisement but also as the presenter of a cooking program and the hostess of the popular variety show Speciale per noi (Special for Us, 1971). Her last appearance on the big screen was in a small supporting role in Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (Lacombe, Lucien, 1974). NORIS, ASSIA (1912–1998). Actress. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, but raised in France, Anastasia von Gerzfeld, under the stage name of Assia Noris, became one of the leading Italian stars of the interwar period. A chance encounter with maverick Italian producer Giuseppe Amato led to her acting debut in Mario Bonnard’s Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932), where she played the part of a rich and spoiled American schoolgirl who wants to have her own tenor. Having been drawn into the world of cinema, she soon became romantically involved with a young Roberto Rossellini, and they were (reputedly) married, although the marriage was, it seems, quickly annulled. Noris’s cinematic career, however, continued to blossom, particularly due to her leading roles in a number of elegant romantic comedies directed by Mario Camerini, in which she was paired with debonair leading man Vittorio De Sica, among them Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935), Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1937), and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939). She subsequently took on more dramatic roles as in Mario Soldati’s directorial debut, Dora Nelson (1939), where she played both a spoiled Russian princess and a lowly worker, and in Renato Castellani’s “calligraphic” Un colpo di pistola (A Pistol Shot, 1942), adapted from a short story by Alexander Pushkin. Outside Italy she appeared in Abel Gance’s remake of Le capitaine Fracasse (Captain Fracasse, 1943) and Louis Daquin’s lackluster adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, Le voyageur de la Toussaint (The Traveler on All Saints’ Day, 1943). She subsequently reappeared in Italy in a number of white telephone comedies, which included Mario Bonnard’s Che distinta famiglia! (What a Distinguished Family!; made 1943, released 1945), in which she was paired with veteran male heartthrob Gino Cervi.

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Although long regarded as the sweetheart of Italy and something of a pinup girl for Italian soldiers during World War II, Noris only surfaced in two films in the postwar period: Amina (1950), made in Egypt by Goffredo Alessandrini, and Carlo Lizzani’s La Celestina P.R. (1965), a film that Noris herself both helped write and produce, and in which she played the madam of a brothel. NOTARI, ELVIRA (1875–1946). Director, producer, scriptwriter, and editor. Born in Salerno in 1875, Elvira Coda moved to Naples in 1902, where she married painter and freelance photographer Nicola Notari. Both were passionately interested in the new medium of moving pictures and, by 1906, were making short actualities and newsreels together, which they were able to screen in the growing number of Neapolitan movie houses. In 1910, they founded the Film Dora production company (changed in 1915 to Dora Film) and began making fictional feature films. Many of these were violent and passionate melodramas with a very distinctive Neapolitan inflection, often adapted from popular novels, such as those of Carolina Invernizio, or from folk songs and local stories. Hugely popular in Naples, these films were less appreciated in other parts of Italy, but Dora Film soon opened an office in New York, where the films found greatest favor among the expatriate Neapolitan community. Having remained an artisanal and family business, the company survived the general crisis that affected the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, but political pressure against manifestations of regional culture from the Fascist authorities and the coming of sound eventually led to its closure in 1930. Still devoted to cinema, Notari continued to run a film acting school in Naples, where she championed the naturalistic style. Most of Notari’s films have been lost, but it is estimated that, along with many shorts and actualities, she directed close to 60 features, among them Il nano rosso (The Red Dwarf, 1917), based on a novel by Invernizio, and Piange Pierrot (Pierrot Cries, 1924), based on a song by Cesare Andrea Bixio. In 1987, to recognize Notari’s often overlooked contribution to Italian cinema, the Casa Internazionale delle Donne established the Elvira Notari Prize, awarded as part of the Venice Festival to the film that best exemplifies women’s achievements. NUTI, FRANCESCO (1955–). Actor, screenwriter, director, and songwriter. One of a number of actor-directors who surfaced on Italian screens in the 1980s after an apprenticeship in cabaret theater, Nuti had achieved a great deal of success on both stage and television as part of the trio I Giancattivi before appearing with them in the zany comedy Ad ovest di paperino (West of Paperino, 1982), directed by Alessandro Benvenuti. Branching out on his

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own as an actor, Nuti then starred in three extremely popular films directed by Maurizio Ponzi: Madonna che silenzio c’è stasera (What a Ghostly Silence There Is Tonight, 1982), Io, Chiara e lo Scuro (The Pool Hustlers, 1983), and Son contento (I’m Happy, 1983), creating through them a lovable if slightly narcissistic comic persona that would earn him something of a cult following. He subsequently directed himself in a string of clever and successful comedies that included Casablanca, Casablanca (1985), which played with topical allusions to the classic Hollywood film by Michael Curtiz; Stregati (Bewitched, 1986); Caruso Pascoski di padre polacco (Caruso Paskoski, Son of a Pole, 1988); OcchioPinocchio (1994); and Il signor Quindicipalle (Mr. Fifteen Balls, 1998), which showcased Nuti’s favorite game, billiards. Having by this time become one of the most popular faces on the Italian screen, Nuti’s career began to falter in the new millennium when a number of his films failed badly at the box office, and he succumbed to a period of withdrawal, depression, and heavy drinking. Ironically, in 2006, as he was beginning to make a return to active filmmaking, he suffered a bad fall at his home, and the resulting blow to the head left him, even after a long period of hospitalization, almost completely incapacitated. In 2010, his career and films were celebrated in a full-length documentary directed by Mario Canale and Annarosa Morri and screened in homage at the Rome Film Festival. In 2011, aided by his brother, Giovanni, he was able to publish his autobiography, Sono un bravo ragazzo—andata, caduta, ritorno (I’m a Good Kid— Rise, Fall, Return).

O OLMI, ERMANNO (1931–2018). Director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. With a continuing strong attachment to his peasant origins and his rural Catholic background, both of which are amply reflected in his major works, Olmi came to occupy a unique position within mainstream Italian cinema through a series of films remarkable for their honesty and their profound commitment to validating the ordinary lives and daily experiences of common people. Having moved to Milan from his native Bergamo at the end of World War II, Olmi began working for the Edison Volta company, for which, from 1953 onward, he produced more than 30 educational and scientific documentaries. From this extensive documentary experience came his first feature, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still, 1959), a slow-paced but intensely engrossing portrayal of a brief encounter between a veteran watchman and a temporary young recruit at an isolated hydroelectric dam in the mountains of northern Italy. Filmed entirely on snowbound location and with nonprofessional actors, the film displays an unflinching devotion to documenting the most minute of everyday events, realistically and without extraneous artificial drama. Olmi’s next feature film, Il posto (The Job, 1961), was a similarly understated but compelling account of the Kafkaesque trials of a young man attempting to secure a job for life in the office of a large and anonymous Milanese company. The film, a penetrating study of modern urban alienation, again acted by nonprofessionals and filmed in the offices of the Edison Volta where Olmi himself had worked, received the Pasinetti Prize at the Venice Festival as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film and thus brought Olmi to worldwide attention. His next film, I fidanzati (The Fiances, 1963), the story of a young couple forced into temporary separation by a company requirement for the man to move to Sicily, was also an acute study of loneliness and isolation. The distinctive realistic style that Olmi developed in these early works explored the communication of human emotions through a relay of looks and silences rather than words and dramatic gestures.

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Subsequent works such as E venne un uomo (A Man Named John, 1965), a respectful biography of Pope John XXIII, met with a more mixed reception, but Olmi returned to international prominence with L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, 1978). A highly authentic re-creation of poor rural life in the peasant communities of Olmi’s native Bergamo region in the late 1800s, the film won both the Palme d’or and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, as well as a host of other national and international awards, including the David di Donatello for Best Film and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1982, together with Mario Brenta and RAI producer Paolo Valmarana, Olmi founded an alternative film school at Bassano del Grappa. Called Ipotesi Cinema, it was structured more as a communal hands-on cooperative than a traditional school, with the explicit aim of helping younger directors successfully make their first films. As part of the process, the school also sought to transmit Olmi’s philosophy of both life and filmmaking, which privileged the respectful observation and documentation of reality over invented action and dramatic spectacle. After Camminacammina (Keep Walking, 1983), a genial retelling of the biblical story of the Magi set in rural Lombardy, Olmi retired from filmmaking due to an incapacitating illness. He returned in 1987 with Lunga vita alla signora (Long Live the Lady!, 1987), a merciless look at the sclerotic stultification of upper-middle-class rituals, seen through the eyes of a young boy training in the hospitality industry. The film’s success at Venice, where it received the Silver Lion, was repeated a year later when La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1988), a contemporary adaptation of an early 20th-century novel by Joseph Roth, was awarded the Golden Lion. A deeply moving film, imbued with a profound humanism, The Legend of the Holy Drinker also received four David di Donatello awards, including for Best Film and Best Director, and the Nastro d’argento for Best Film and Best Screenplay. By contrast, Olmi’s next major feature, Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Wood, 1993), an animistic fable adapted from a novel by Dino Buzzati, divided critics for what was seen as its ecological didacticism and a style that was unfairly characterized as “Bambi meets National Geographic.” After Genesi (Genesis, the Creation and the Flood, 1994), a made-fortelevision epic retelling of the first seven books of the Bible, Olmi returned to the silver screen with the austere but visually stunning Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms, 2001). A chronicle of the final days of the legendary Renaissance military leader Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the film documents with extreme dignity his slow and painful death provoked ignominiously by the newly invented but deadly firearm. The implicit antiwar message of Il mestiere was echoed in the charming Cantando dietro i paraventi (Singing behind Screens, 2003), a fable-like and highly theatrical adaptation of a 19th-century Chinese poem in which Madame Ching, the wife of a

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treacherously murdered admiral, leads a marauding band of pirates in an attempt to avenge her beloved husband’s death but, eventually, wisely accepts the offer of the palm of peace from the emperor. For Olmi, ever the champion of a compassionate humanism, such a pacifist gesture is the only possible response to what has become the ongoing age of terror in the early 21st century. After the passionate denunciation of a religion, and a culture, which appeared to have come to love books and learning more than real human beings in Centochiodi (One Hundred Nails, 2007), Olmi celebrated the Slow Food movement and a return to nature in his documentaries Terra madre (2009) and Rupi del vino (Cliffs of Wine, 2009) before making Il villaggio di cartone (The Cardboard Village, 2011), in which an old and disillusioned parish priest regains his spiritual faith by defying official prohibition by Italian law in harboring a group of illegal African migrants in his deconsecrated church. Three years later, Olmi returned to once more express his pacifism on the big screen in his final film, Torneranno i prati (Greenery Will Bloom Again, 2014), a lacerating condemnation of the senseless slaughter of the First World War, dedicated to Olmi’s father, who had been fortunate enough to have survived the ordeal. OMEGNA, ROBERTO (1876–1948). Cinematographer and documentarist. Generally regarded as the father of Italian scientific and documentary filmmaking, Omegna began making films in 1904 using a camera supplied by Arturo Ambrosio. His first “actualities” recorded the running of a historic automobile race (La prima corsa automobilistica Susa–Moncenisio) and military maneuvers of the Italian Alpine regiment. After helping Ambrosio to establish Ambrosio Film as a production company in 1906, Omegna became head of its technical department and sometime director. He supervised the making of more than 100 films for the company, ranging all the way from simple comic sketches and psychological dramas to highly successful swordand-sandal epics like Nerone (Nero, 1909) and La schiavo di Cartagine (The Slave of Carthage, 1910). In 1914, he directed a number of films for Centauro Film, in particular the much-acclaimed Chiavi d’oro e chiavi di ferro (Keys of Gold and Keys of Iron). His strongest passion, however, remained documentary filmmaking and in particular the nature documentary, which he helped pioneer. Extensive travel throughout Africa and India resulted in dozens of fascinating documentaries, among them La caccia al leopardo (The Leopard Hunt, 1909), Usi e costumi abissini (Abyssinian Customs, 1910), and Elefanti al lavoro (Elephants at Work, 1911). In 1911, his remarkable La vita delle farfalle (The Life of the Butterfly) was awarded first prize in the documentary film section of the Turin International Exhibition.

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In 1926, after the demise of Ambrosio Film, Omegna became the head of the scientific department of the newly formed Istituto LUCE, where he spent the next two decades producing scores of award-winning educational films until his retirement in 1942. ORLANDO, SILVIO (1957–). Actor. A leading member of the new generation of actors who emerged in the 1990s, Orlando graduated to film after working onstage with Gabriele Salvatores at the Teatro dell’Elfo, making his first appearance on the big screen in Salvatores’s Kamikazen ultima notte a Milano (Last Night in Milan, 1987). After distinguishing himself in a strong supporting role in Nanni Moretti’s Palombella rossa (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989), he starred as the affable and honest schoolteacher forced to turn speechwriter for a corrupt politician in Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), a characterization he would reprise in Luchetti’s La scuola (School, 1995). Following the film’s extraordinary success, not least for the way in which it anticipated all the revelations of systematic corruption in Italian politics subsequently revealed by the Mani pulite investigations, Orlando came to work with all the directors of the New Italian Cinema: with Salvatores again in Sud (South, 1993) and Nirvana (1994), with Carlo Mazzacurati in Un’altra vita (Another Life, 1992) and Vesna va veloce (Vesna Moves Quickly, 1995), with Paolo Virzì in Ferie d’agosto (Summer Holidays, 1996), and with Giuseppe Piccioni in Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World, 1999) and Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes, 2000). In the late 1990s, he also often returned to the stage, playing Caliban in Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s 1999 production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and directing himself in several comedies by Peppino De Filippo. Having already won a Nastro d’argento for his lead role in Mimmo Calopresti’s Preferisco il rumore del mare (I Prefer the Sound of the Sea, 2000), he was awarded the David di Donatello and nominated for the European Film Award for his brilliant performance as a faltering filmmaker in Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006). After turning back to the stage to play the lead in Roberto Paci Dalò’s L’assedio delle ceneri (Seige of Ashes, 2008), he returned to the big screen to deliver one of his most memorable performances in Pupi Avati’s Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father, 2008), earning him another David di Donatello and at Venice both the Volpi Cup and Pasinetti Prize. He subsequently played another genial filmmakerin-strife in Mazzacurati’s La passione (2010) and the investigating Inspector Montella in Roberto Faenza’s Il delitto di Via Poma (The Via Poma Case, 2011) before treading the theatrical floorboards again in the role of Shylock in a production of The Merchant of Venice at the Piccolo Teatro Strehler of Milan. After appearing as Inspector Monaco in Massimiliano Bruno’s La variabile umana (The Human Factor, 2013) and as the enterprising town mayor in Massimo Gaudioso’s Un paese quasi perfetto (An Almost Perfect

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Town, 2016), Orlando achieved international renown in his role as Cardinal Voiello, the Vatican secretary of state, in Paolo Sorrentino’s big-budget HBO 10-part miniseries The Young Pope (2016). Ever modest, he subsequently returned to the stage to delight audiences in Domenico Starnone’s Lacci at the Piccolo Eliseo Theater in Rome and, more recently, in Lucia Calamaro’s Si nota all’imbrunire (One Sees at Dusk, 2019) at Rome’s Teatro Argentina before reprising his role as Cardinal Vioello in Sorrentino’s new HBO series The New Pope (2020). ORSINI, VALENTINO (1927–2001). Critic, screenwriter, and director. A filmmaker of unwavering social and political commitment as well as a courageous experimenter with filmic techniques, Orsini never succeeded in receiving the critical and popular recognition that he undoubtedly deserved. Still in his teens, Orsini fought in the Resistance movement. After the war, he began organizing film clubs and writing film criticism. His early films were written and directed in close collaboration with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, beginning with Un uomo da bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962), a film about the union activist Salvatore Carnevale (played masterfully by Gian Maria Volontè), who was eventually murdered by the Mafia for his social activism. Further collaboration with the Taviani brothers resulted in I fuorilegge del matrimonio (Outlaws of Love, 1963), a film in six episodes that attempted to deal with the fraught question of divorce, which was still not legal in Italy at the time. In 1969, inspired by the militant ideas of West Indian psychoanalyst and social philosopher Franz Fanon, Orsini directed his first solo film, I dannati della terra (The Wretched of the Earth, 1969). This was followed by Corbari (1970), the realistic, if heroic, portrayal of the maverick Resistance fighter Silvio Corbari, who was such a thorn in the side of the Fascists that, when caught, he was executed twice as an example to others. Two years later, L’amante dell’Orsa Maggiore (The Smugglers, 1972) was a more mainstream and conventional story of love and intrigue adapted from a novel by Polish writer Sergiusz Piasecki. Its lackluster reception led Orsini to a period of silence until Uomini e no (Men and Not Men, 1980), another very competent literary adaptation but this time of the eponymous Resistance novel by Elio Vittorini. Five years later, Orsini’s last film, Figlio mio infinitamente caro (My Dearest Son, 1985), movingly presented the plight of a loving father attempting to save his son from advanced drug addiction. At this point, discouraged by what appeared to be a continuing lack of popular and critical reaction to his films, Orsini retired from active filmmaking, although he continued to teach at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (National Film School) for a number of years.

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ORTOLANI, RIZ (1926–2014). Musician, songwriter, and film composer. One of the most prolific and versatile composers of Italian cinema, Riziero (Riz) Ortolani, who at times also worked under the name Roger Higgins, graduated from the Gioacchino Rossini Conservatory in his native Pesaro before moving to Rome to work as a pianist and arranger for the national RAI radio. After writing a great deal of music for theater and television, in the mid-1950s he began composing for films, achieving his first major triumph with the soundtrack of Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo cane (1962). The film’s theme song, “More,” sung by Katyna Ranieri, became an international best seller, and Ortolani was nominated for both a Grammy and an Academy Award. He subsequently scored all of Jacopetti’s “shockumentaries” while also collaborating with a wide variety of Italian and foreign directors, among them Vittorio De Sica, Dino Risi, Franco Zeffirelli, Anthony Asquith, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Robert Siodmak. He worked prolifically in all the popular genres but became especially identified with the giallo, providing memorable soundtracks for such classics as Umberto Lenzi’s Così dolce così perversa (So Sweet . . . So Perverse, 1970) and Lucio Fulci’s Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972). In the early 1980s, after having written the music for Ruggero Deodato’s controversial and much-banned Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, 1980), he began a long and fruitful collaboration with Pupi Avati, for whom he scored all the major films from Zeder (1983) to Una sconfinata giovinezza (A Second Childhood, 2010). At the same time, he also worked extensively for Italian television, writing the music for popular miniseries like La piovra (The Octopus, 1984), Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus, 1985), La famiglia Ricordi (The Ricordi Family, 1995), and, most recently, the sixepisode Un matrimonio (2013–2014), directed by Avati. With more than 200 film and television scores to his credit, Ortolani was twice nominated for the Oscar and four times for the Golden Globes. In Italy, having been nominated a dozen times, he received four David di Donatello awards and three Nastri d’argento. In 2013, the World Soundtrack Association honored him with its Lifetime Achievement award, and following his death, in 2014 he was posthumously awarded a Special David for his entire career. See also MONDO FILM. OSSESSIONE (1943). Film. Ossessione marked Luchino Visconti’s directorial debut. Provisionally titled Palude (Swamp), it was a free (and unauthorized) adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which transposed Cain’s story of marital infidelity, lust, and murder from California during the Depression era to the Po Valley in Fascist Italy. Although it undoubtedly demonstrated a surprising maturity for a director on his first attempt, the film itself emerged as something of a collaborative project between Visconti and a number of young left-wing critics and aspir-

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ing filmmakers associated with the journal Cinema, with the screenplay being cowritten by Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, Antonio Pietrangeli, Mario Alicata, and Gianni Puccini. From their own later accounts, Visconti and this extended group saw the film as a vital opportunity to give a new truth and direction to an Italian cinema that they regarded as having become sclerotic and detached from reality. In order to carry out this project of renewal, Visconti had originally engaged the relatively unknown Massimo Girotti and stage star Anna Magnani to play the lead roles, but the discovery of Magnani’s advanced state of pregnancy forced Visconti to substitute Clara Calamai in the role of Giovanna. The story, with a number of significant additions and with changes necessitated by the Italian context, follows the general lines of Cain’s narrative. Penniless and drifting, Gino (Girotti) arrives at a highway roadhouse run by the older and boorish Bragana (Juan de Landa) and soon meets his sultry young wife, Giovanna. Sensing immediately Giovanna’s mutual physical attraction, Gino readily accepts Bragana’s invitation to remain and work at the roadhouse, and as a result, he and Giovanna are soon engaged in a torrid love affair behind Bragana’s back. They decide to leave and start a new life together elsewhere, but along the way Giovanna changes her mind and returns home to her husband. Adrift again on his own, Gino is befriended by Lo Spagnolo (The Spaniard), a young freewheeling vagabond who has lived for a period in Spain (hence his name) but who now travels around Italy making his living as a fairground fortune-teller. Given that Lo Spagnolo tries to get Gino to forget Giovanna and that he later also betrays Gino to the police, it is important to note that the character does not appear in Cain’s novel but is one of the major additions carried out in the film. According to the screenwriters’ own later declarations, Lo Spagnolo’s free-spirited attitude and the allusion to the Spanish Civil War in his connection with Spain was intended to make him a cipher for a rejection of the claustrophobic conformism demanded by the Fascist regime. It is doubtful whether such an interpretation emerges quite so clearly ifrom a viewing of the film today, with most contemporary viewers being more likely, perhaps, to read the character’s sexual and moral ambivalence as a gay undertext. In any case, Gino and Lo Spagnolo begin to work the fairgrounds together, which is where one day Gino meets the Bragana couple again. While the husband, who is an opera buff, takes part in a singing competition, Gino and Giovanna renew their earlier bond, with the result that Gino accepts Bragana’s offer to return with them to the roadhouse. On the way, exploiting the opportunity of Bragana’s drunkenness, Gino and Giovanna stage a road accident in which the husband dies. Although the police appear to remain suspicious of the incident, the couple should now be able to live happily together at the roadhouse, but Gino continues to be haunted by a mixture of

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Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai in Ossessione (1943), directed by Luchino Visconti. Courtesy of Photofest.

remorse and restlessness, which is further exacerbated by a chance visit from Lo Spagnolo. The strained rapport between the couple deteriorates further when, during a visit they make to Ferrara, Gino learns that Giovanna has collected life insurance on Bragana’s death. Suspecting that he has been used as a pawn for her own purposes, Gino aggressively abandons Giovanna

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and takes refuge with a young prostitute, to whom he contritely confesses the murder. Noticing, however, that he is being followed by the police, he concludes that Giovanna has denounced him to the authorities, and so he returns to the roadhouse to confront her with the accusation. His anger turns to tenderness when he discovers that not only has she not denounced him but she is carrying his child. Emotionally reconciled, they prepare to leave the roadhouse and begin another life elsewhere. As fortune would have it, however, as they drive hopefully toward a future together, their car veers off the road in heavy fog, and Giovanna is killed. The police, who have been following all along, soon arrive, and Gino is arrested. Although filmed, largely on location, in late 1942, the eagerly awaited film had its premiere in Rome only in May 1943. There have always been conflicting accounts of how the film was received. An often-repeated version claims that Vittorio Mussolini, who was present at the screening, knocked over chairs as he walked out in disgust, shouting, “This is not Italy.” Giuseppe De Santis, however, in his account, reports that the film was not only well received but that Vittorio Mussolini spoke warmly to Visconti and reaffirmed the positive judgment of the film given by his father, Il Duce, who had apparently seen it earlier in a private screening. Whatever the truth of either version, what seems undeniable is that the film was never widely distributed and where it was shown it often received a hostile reception from local civil and religious authorities who objected to what they regarded as its execrable morals. It only began to be screened in Italy after 1945, when it came to be widely acclaimed as an immediate precursor, if not first incarnation, of Neorealism. In the United States, copyright problems prevented it from being widely screened until the mid-1960s, by which time Hollywood had already made the first of its own two versions of Cain’s novel. OZPETEK, FERZAN (1959–). Writer and director. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Ozpetek moved to Rome in 1977, where he studied the history of cinema at La Sapienza University and theater direction at the National Academy of Dramatic Art. He then joined Julian Beck and the Living Theater troupe for a short period before abandoning the stage in order to work as an assistant for a number of the younger emerging Italian directors, including Massimo Troisi, Maurizio Ponzi, and Ricky Tognazzi. In 1997, he was able to direct his first feature, Hamam, il bagno turco (Steam: The Turkish Baths), an intense drama of self-discovery that was warmly received when it premiered at Cannes and in Italy brought its producers a Nastro d’argento. This was followed by Harem suarè (1999), an exotic tale that allowed a now elderly Lucia Bosè, playing the female protagonist’s older self, to reminisce about her days as the sultan’s favorite concubine in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, and Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life, 2001), the story of a wife painfully coming to terms with the discovery of her husband’s homosexuality

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after his death in a car accident. La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows, 2003), a similarly intense drama of interpersonal relationships and unexpected discoveries, also provided Massimo Girotti with his last major film role, and it received five David di Donatello awards, including Best Film. Two years later, Ozpetek’s Cuore sacro (Sacred Heart, 2005) was an inspiring fable of an impossible altruism set against the backdrop of modern consumer culture. He continued to explore the depths of the human heart in Saturno Contro (Saturn in Opposition, 2007), which observed an extended group of close friends forced to examine their own selves and their relationship to each other by the abrupt death of a central member of the group, and the ironically titled Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day, 2008), a film where passionate love tragically metamorphoses into violence. Confirming the value of his work and already his status as a first-rate filmmaker, in December 2008 the New York MoMA honored him with a retrospective of his first seven films. A year later, he directed the short Nonostante tutto è Pasqua (Despite Everything It’s Easter, 2009), as a tribute to a young student killed in the earthquake at Aquila and forming part of an ensemble film project to remember the victims of the earthquake. This was followed by Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons, 2010), a comedy despite its highlighting of a widespread homophobia in Italy, before Ozpetek turned to one of his other passions, the lyric theater, to direct a much-acclaimed production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (2011). Returning to the big screen, he revived a company of ghosts in Magnifica presenza (A Magnificent Haunting, 2012) before again turning to the stage to direct an innovative version of Verdi’s La traviata at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. After dealing with no less than the issue of a diagnosis of cancer in Allacciate le cinture (Fasten Your Seat Belts, 2014), he published his autobiography, Sei la mia vita (You Are My Life, 2015). Two years later, he returned to his native Turkey to film Istanbul Kirmizisi (Red Instanbul, 2017), adapted, even if very loosely, from the novel by the same name that he had published four years earlier, before making Napoli velata (Naples in Veils, 2017), a mystery thriller but also a postcard to a city that he’s come to regard as his own. Most recently, in 2019, he directed a much-acclaimed production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. He now has his own official website at http://www.ferzanozpetek.com.

P PACCHIONI, ITALO (1872–1940). Cameraman and film pioneer. Owner of a photographic studio in Milan in the early 1890s, Pacchioni was greatly excited by the Lumière cinématographe but was unable to acquire one for himself. Consequently, with the help of his brother Enrico, he managed to build his own version of a Lumière-style movie camera and began filming events around him. Pacchioni’s footage of a train arriving at the station in Milan is thus probably the first film shot in Italy with an Italian camera. This was followed by some basic comic sketches such as Il finto storpio al Castello Sforzesco di Milano (The Sham Cripple at the Sforza Castle in Milan, 1896) and a number of other attempts at short filmic narratives, some reputedly shot on the terrace of his own house with his relatives as actors. After a period of showing his films for a paying public in the local theater, he and his brother took to the road in an elaborate traveling pavilion in which they screened films at provincial fairs throughout northern Italy. In 1901, Pacchioni filmed the elaborate funeral of the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, which he screened in March that year. For unknown reasons, however, after such a flurry of cinematic activity, by 1902 Pacchioni appears to have returned to his photographic studio and never been involved with the cinema again. PAGANO, BARTOLOMEO (1878–1947). Actor. A Genoese dockworker with no previous acting experience, Pagano was chosen by producer-director Giovanni Pastrone, largely on the basis of his powerful physique and gentle disposition, to play the part of the faithful slave Maciste in the spectacular ancient Roman epic Cabiria (1914). The overwhelming international success of the film and Pagano’s sympathetic portrayal of the good-natured strongman who helps rescue the infant Cabiria from the jaws of the Carthaginian fire-god Moloch, led to the character acquiring a life of his own. Pagano thus went on to play “the good giant,” as he was affectionately known, in a long and very popular series of Maciste films, first in Italy with Pastrone’s Itala Film company and then, during the downturn of the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, in Germany, making four Maciste films there between 1922 363

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and 1924. He subsequently returned to Italy to make another series of Maciste films for the Fert Pittaluga company, the most famous of which was Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, made in 1925 but in Italy held up by the censors until 1926). In the late 1920s, Pagano attempted to break out of the Maciste mold by accepting roles in films like Il vetturale di Moncenisio (The Courier of Moncenisio, 1928) and Giuditta e Oloferne (Judith and Holofernes, 1929), but the films were only moderately successful and, in any case, their publicity continued to exploit the Maciste connection. At this point, as good-natured as the character he had played in all those films, Pagano declared his intention to act in only one real-life film from then on: Maciste in Retirement. PAMPANINI, SILVANA (1925–2016). Actress. One of the first of the maggiorate, or large-bosomed starlets, who came to dominate the Italian screen in the immediate postwar period, Pampanini briefly studied singing at the Conservatorium of Santa Cecilia in Rome but was drawn to acting in films following the notoriety she achieved, and the popular support she received, in eventually winning the 1946 Miss Italia contest. After a fleeting appearance in Giuseppe Maria Scotese’s L’apocalisse (Apocalypse, 1946), her first significant role was in Camillo Mastrocinque’s Il segreto di Don Giovanni (When Love Calls, 1947), which was followed by a host of popular films that attempted to exploit her pinup qualities. In the early 1950s, she extended herself in a number of more dramatic roles, as in Luigi Zampa’s Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial, 1952), and Giuseppe De Santis’s Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (A Husband for Anna, 1953), while also appearing in French films such as Abel Gance’s La Tour de Nesle (Tower of Lust, 1955) and in the Mexican melodrama Sed de amor (Thirst for Love, 1959), directed by Alfonso Corona Blake. From the mid-1950s, she also became a familiar face on television, hosting a number of variety programs on the national broadcaster, RAI. However, unlike other maggiorate such as Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, Pampanini’s career declined sharply in the mid-1960s, and one of her last substantial roles was, ironically, that of a fading Italian film starlet in Dino Risi’s Il gaucho (The Gaucho, 1964). After appearing sporadically in the odd lightweight comedy during the 1970s, she reappeared on the small screen, playing the role of a mother in the television miniseries Tre stelle (Three Stars, 1999) and hosting the variety program Domenica In in 2002. PASOLINI, PIER PAOLO (1922–1975). Poet, playwright, novelist, painter, essayist, and film director. Although he would become one of the foremost directors to emerge in the second wave of postwar Italian cinema in the

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early 1960s, Pasolini came to cinema relatively late in life, after having already established a strong reputation as an innovative poet, novelist, and radical cultural critic, in search of an alternative medium for self-expression. Having been expelled from both his teaching post and the Communist Party for alleged homosexual activities, in 1950 Pasolini moved from the northern Italian town of Casarsa, where he had lived with his mother since the end of World War II, to one of the poorer outlying districts of Rome. Despite continuing financial hardship, he quickly became part of the city’s bustling literary scene and published several acclaimed collections of poetry before also beginning to work in the cinema, his first involvement being a collaboration on the screenplay of Mario Soldati’s La donna del fiume (The River Girl, 1954). In the wake of the publication of his controversial novel Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), which presented a vivid portrait of the precarious existence lived by so many young men in the borgate (shantytowns) that he had come to know so well, Pasolini was approached ever more frequently to work on the screenplays of films that were set in the seamier side of Rome. He thus contributed to writing the dialogues of Federico Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) before also working with Mauro Bolognini on the screenplays of a half dozen films, including La notte brava (The Big Night, 1959), Il bell’Antonio (Bell’ Antonio, 1960), and La giornata balorda (From a Roman Balcony, 1960). After playing a small role in Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), an experience that allowed him to become familiar with the more technical aspects of filmmaking, he finally wrote and directed his first film, Accattone (Accattone!, 1961), the story of a truculent layabout and sometime pimp in one of the Roman borgate whose wayward existence and baneful ordeals nevertheless mark him out as a sort of negative Christ figure. The film’s non-moralistic portrayal of prostitutes and petty thieves, coupled with its use of Christological imagery in a profane context, immediately drew censure from the authorities, who originally sought to ban the film outright but eventually allowed its release under an R rating. Pasolini’s second film, Mamma Roma (1962), also set in the Roman borgate and featuring Anna Magnani in one of the most voluble roles of her career, was also denounced for obscenity at its first screening but later absolved of the charge. An even harsher reaction attended “La ricotta” (“The Curd Cheese”), a short selfcontained episode that Pasolini contributed to the compilation film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), with the film’s being impounded by the authorities for its alleged offensiveness to the Catholic religion and Pasolini himself receiving a four-month suspended jail sentence. Almost as a rejoinder, Pasolini then made a powerful but iconoclastic adaptation of what he regarded as the most socially committed of the Gospels, Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew, 1964). The film, screened to great acclaim at the Venice Festival that year,

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received both the Special Jury Prize and the Office Catholique International du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel (OCIC) Award and went on to win three Nastri d’argento and three nominations for Academy Awards. Following Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964), an illuminating documentary investigation of the sexual attitudes of contemporary Italians, filmed largely while Pasolini was scouting locations for Il vangelo, he directed Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966), a surreal road movie that utilized the great acting talents of Totò to construct what was effectively a filmic essay on the death of political ideologies in the guise of a picaresque adventure. A bizarre filmic concoction but typical of Pasolini’s way of using the cinema to present his provocative ideas, Uccellacci was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and won two Nastri d’argento at home. Totò would also feature in two subsequent short films, “La terra vista dalla luna” (“The Earth Seen from the Moon”), which was Pasolini’s contribution to the compilation film Le streghe (The Witches, 1967), and Che cosa sono le nuvole? (What Are the Clouds?), a charming existential fable that became one of the episodes of Capriccio all’italiana (Caprice Italian Style, 1968). After playing the part of a revolutionary Mexican priest in Lizzani’s political Western Requiescant (Kill and Pray, 1967), Pasolini made the first of his screen adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies, Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967). Stunning in its creation of an archaic mythopoeic setting that avoided all the usual iconography of ancient Greek culture (the film was, in fact, shot mostly in Morocco), Oedipus was also remarkable for the way in which it succeeded in faithfully adapting Sophocles’s text while also subjectively expressing Pasolini’s always-admitted oedipal conflict with his own father. Pasolini’s next film, Teorema (Theorem, 1968), adapted from a book he had already published the same year, profoundly divided the critics at Venice and again put Pasolini at the center of controversy. A highly ambivalent allegory that could be read both as a profanation and as a spiritual epiphany, the film received the Office Catholique International du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel (OCIC) Award but, at the same time, was also strongly attacked by other religious authorities. Following what had by now become a pattern, the film was impounded by the authorities on the usual charges of obscenity but eventually acquitted of the charges and released. Following Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film on India, 1968), a short documentary eventually shown on television, Pasolini made Porcile (Pigpen, 1969), another highly idiosyncratic and ambiguous allegory that appeared purposely structured to resist univocal interpretation. This was followed by the second of Pasolini’s adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy, Medea (1969), which was memorable for, among other elements, a brilliant performance in the lead role by opera diva, Maria Callas. After so many difficult works, Pasolini lightened up with his next three films, Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971), I racconti di Canterbury (The Can-

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terbury Tales, 1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (A Thousand and One Nights, 1974). United under the rubric of what he called his Trilogy of Life, all three were creative but relatively faithful adaptations of canonical literary works and all were celebrations of the body and of human sexuality. Pasolini’s own appearance as a fresco painter, strongly suggested to be Giotto, in one of the frame stories of Il Decameron, and as Geoffrey Chaucer himself in The Canterbury Tales, also added a self-reflexive and personal dimension to the films. This lightness of tone and joie de vivre, however, was short lived. In 1975, largely in response to what he had come to see as an ever more degraded Italian social and political reality around him, Pasolini made his bleakest and most nihilistic cinematic statement, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). The film was first screened at the Paris Festival on 23 November 1975, three weeks after Pasolini himself had been brutally murdered in Rome, allegedly by a young male prostitute, although everything about this event would subsequently be enveloped in murk and doubt. An unflinching representation of naked power at its worst, Salò proved to be so confrontational that it was completely banned in Italy and in most other countries until quite recently, its dark shadow at times succeeding in obscuring the extraordinary overall achievement of Pasolini’s remarkable cinematic body of work.

Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewing a girl in Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964). Courtesy of Photofest.

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PASQUINI, ANGELO (1948–). Screenwriter and director. After being one of the animators and writers of the notorious satirical journal Il Male, Pasquini began working in films as a cowriter for Daniele Luchetti’s Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow, 1988). He collaborated again with Luchetti on La settimana della sfinge (The Week of the Sphinx, 1990) and on I l portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), for which he supplied the story. He subsequently worked with Gabriele Salvatores on Sud (South, 1993), with Michele Placido on Le amiche del cuore (Close Friends, 1992) and Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero, 1995), with Mario Brenta on Barnabo delle montagne (Barnabo of the Mountains, 1994), and with Sergio Rubini on Prestazione straordinaria (Working Overtime, 1994). In the late 1990s, after writing and directing his first feature film, Santo Stefano (1997), he also began working extensively for Italian television, writing, among other things, one of the episodes of the popular Inspector Montalbano series, Il commissario Montalbano: La voce del violino (Inspector Montalbano: The Sound of the Violin, 1999). In the new millennium, as well as more television work, he collaborated on the screenplay of Rubini’s La terra (The Land, 2006), sharing a nomination for the David di Donatello for Best Screenplay, and worked with Placido again on Il grande sogno (The Big Dream, 2009) and Vallanzasca, gli angeli del male (Angel of Evil, 2010). He subsequently struck up a strong preofessional relationship with Roberto Andò, cowriting Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom, 2013), which brought both of them the David and the Nastro d’argento for Best Screenplay, and attracting another Nastro nomination for his contribution to Andò’s Una storia senza nome (The Stolen Caravaggio, 2018). His most recent collaboration has been with Rubini on Il grande spirito (The Great Spirit, 2019). PASTRONE, GIOVANNI (1883–1959). Producer, director, administrator. Long only remembered as the producer and director of Cabiria (1914), Pastrone has continued to grow in stature as more recent research has revealed his major role in, and contribution to, the Italian film industry during its golden silent period. A gifted child with a talent for both music and languages, Pastrone was soon forced to abandon music in favor of accounting. It was as a bright junior accountant and factotum that he joined the Turin film company of Carlo Rossi & C. in 1907. Within six months, he had risen through the ranks and become a full partner. When Rossi left to work for the Cines in Rome, Pastrone and fellow partner, Carlo Sciamengo, transformed the company into Itala Film. Pastrone soon reorganized the company on a firm commercial basis, introducing stricter management, planning, and accounting practices as well as technical innovations. Recognizing the popularity of comic sketches at the time, he lured Pathé’s most successful resident comic, André Deed, to come to Turin to work for Itala. Deed’s Cretinetti films, turned out for a

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time at the rate of one a week, were a gold mine for the company and kept it solvent. At the same time, Pastrone produced and directed the epic spectacle La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1911). Poorly received at home, the film broke box office records in the United States, allowing Pastrone to open up an American subsidiary. It also prompted him to plan the greatest film made to date, Cabiria, a film that would require almost a year and an astronomical budget to make. Taking out a patent on what would become known as the dolly—Alfred Hitchcock would later attest that in his early days it was still known in the trade as the cabiria—Pastrone also shrewdly recruited the best special effects cinematographer of the day, Segundo de Chomón, to work for Itala. With the film meticulously planned and partly completed, Pastrone conceived the masterstroke of approaching the greatest Italian literary figure of the time, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and propose paying him a huge fee to accept paternity of the film, an offer that D’Annunzio gleefully accepted. D’Annunzio’s prestigious name helped make what was an extraordinary cinematic achievement even more spectacularly successful at the box office, both at home and abroad, and thus allowed Pastrone to proceed to other projects. In the following years, as well as initiating the long line of films featuring Maciste, the muscle-bound strongman first appearing in Cabiria, he also directed (under the pseudonym Piero Fosco) the diva Pina Menichelli in Il fuoco (The Fire, 1915) and Tigre reale (Royal Tigress, 1916), as well as his own discovery, Itala Almirante Manzini, in a fine adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1919). Nevertheless, by the end of World War I, with the onset of the crisis that would soon decimate the Italian film industry, Pastrone had lost financial control of Itala. He briefly joined, under duress, the Unione Cinematografica Italiana (Italian Cinematographic Union), but following the trust’s refusal to fund a major project he had proposed, he abandoned the industry to carry on scientific and other studies in private for many years. His only real subsequent connections with the cinema were supervising the issue of a sound version of Cabiria with a coordinated musical track in the early 1930s and his strong support for the setting up of the National Film Museum in Turin. He died, relatively neglected and forgotten, in 1959 just as the new golden age of Italian cinema was beginning. PEDERSOLI, CARLO (1929–2016). Actor. After engaging in a wide variety of occupations and having been at various times a champion Olympic swimmer, an assembly line worker, a film extra, and a songwriter, in 1967 Pedersoli was offered one of the lead roles in the Spaghetti Western Dio perdona . . . io no! (God Forgives, I Don’t, 1967), playing alongside another little-known actor, Mario Girotti. Following what had become something of a traditional ruse in the Italian Western, both actors adopted anglicized stage names, Girotti becoming Terence Hill and Pedersoli taking on the name of

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Bud Spencer (in homage to his preferred brand of American beer and his favorite American actor, Spencer Tracy). Their appearance in a handful of other subsequent films made them a popular duo, but they then gained an overwhelming, and international, cult following with the knockabout comic Western Lo chiamavano Trinità (They Call Me Trinity, 1970), which topped the Italian box office that year, in a success that was confirmed and augmented by its immediate sequel, Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name!, 1971). They continued to appear together in a dozen subsequent films, but Pedersoli (always as Bud Spencer) also branched out on his own, achieving his own cult following appearing in a limited number of character roles, the most famous in Italy being that of Inspector “Flatfoot” Rizzo in a series of comic police dramas directed by Steno. He became especially renowned in Germany, where in 1979 he received the Jupiter Prize as Most Popular Actor, and Lo chiamavano Bulldozer (Uppercut, 1978), a film in which he played one of his most typical roles, received the Golden Screen Award. After 30 years of playing an amiable hulk who uses his fists to bring evildoers back to the straight and narrow, in the new millennium Pedersoli took on a number of more demanding dramatic roles, and in 2003 (as Bud Spencer), he was nominated for a Nastro d’argento as Best Supporting Actor in Ermanno Olmi’s Cantando dietro i paraventi (Singing behind Screens). Retiring from the cinema in 2010, he was able to publish his autobiography, Altrimenti mi arrabbio: La mia vita (Otherwise I’ll Get Angry: My Life, 2010, coauthored with Lorenzo Di Luca). In 2017, a year after his peaceful death in the midst of all his family, a two-meter-high lifelike bronze statue of the “Good Giant” was erected in his memory on the Corvin Promenade in Budapest, Hungary, a country in which his films had always been greatly loved. PEPLUM. Genre. Derived from the Latin term for the small over-the-shoulder tunic often worn in these films, peplum was the name given to the popular sword-and-sandal genre that flourished in Italy from the late 1950s. Some 180 such films were made in Italy between 1957 and 1965, when the genre rapidly waned and was replaced by an even more prolific genre, the Italian or so-called Spaghetti Western. The distant origins of the peplum were undoubtedly in the historical and mythological superspectacles, or “kolossals,” of the silent period, and it was no coincidence that the names of Ursus and Maciste, the muscular strongmen who had first made their appearance in Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? (1913) and Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), reappeared so frequently in the titles of many classics of the genre. Its more immediate forerunners, however, were the spate of American historical and biblical spectaculars produced at Cinecittà in the early 1950s, as well as several homegrown big-budget

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epics such as Alessandro Blasetti’s Fabiola (1949) and Mario Camerini’s Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954). The peplums themselves, however, were far from big-budget productions, and the film usually credited with giving birth to the genre, Pietro Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1958), was made for $120,000 but eventually earned $18 million. Francisci tried to repeat his winning formula—which included the hiring of a relatively inexpensive bodybuilder rather than a costly star to play the part of the muscleman superhero and concentrating on the hero’s action-filled adventures rather than the rise and fall of civilizations—in Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1959), but by this time, many others were also attempting to follow his original example, with four other muscleman epics produced in 1959, 15 in 1960, and 31 in 1961. The directors who came to be most closely associated with the genre, in addition to Francisci himself, were Vittorio Cottafavi, who made two classics of the genre, La vendetta di Ercole (Vengeance of Hercules, 1960, also known in the United States as Goliath and the Dragon) and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, 1961, also known in the United States as Hercules and the Captive Women); Riccardo Freda, who directed five muscleman epics, including Maciste alta corte del Gran Khan (Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan, 1961, also known as Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World) and Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1962, also known as The Witch’s Curse); and Carlo Campogalliani, who contributed Il terrore dei barbari (Goliath and the Barbarians, 1959), Maciste nella valle dei re (Son of Samson, 1960), and Ursus (Ursus, Son of Hercules, 1961). Among other practitioners of the genre were Domenico Paolella, Sergio Corbucci, and Duccio Tessari. Mario Mattoli inflected the genre with comedy in his Maciste contro Ercole nella valle dei guai (Hercules in the Valley of Woe, 1961) and Mario Bava with horror in Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961). Sergio Leone, who would be responsible for the birth of the Western genre that would soon replace the peplum, was called in to complete Mario Bonnard’s foray into the genre, Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959), before making his own highly regarded peplum, Il colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes, 1961). The musclemen who were enlisted to impersonate the superhero, who could be called, quite interchangeably, Maciste, Hercules, Ursus, Goliath, Samson, or Colossus, were for the most part American bodybuilders, including Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Gordon Scott, Mark Forrest, Kirk Morris, Ed Fury, Dan Vadis, and the locally grown Alan Steel (Sergio Ciani). And just as the hero’s name could vary, the stories themselves could also be set in widely differing times and places, from Greek and Roman historical or mythological times to the “barbaric” Middle Ages, and from Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and the Orient to the very center of the Earth.

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Generally dismissed by serious critics and relatively short lived, the genre was nevertheless both popular and lucrative, exploiting the extensive network of Italian second- and third-run cinemas and easily accessing markets outside Italy because many of the films were made as European or American coproductions. Despite its extraordinary success, however, the genre was already substantially on the wane in 1964 when the enormous box office receipts of Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), a Western all’italiana directed by Bob Robertson (Sergio Leone), were already indicating another way forward for Italian popular cinema. PERILLI, IVO (1902–1994). Screenwriter and director. After working in the theater as a set designer during the 1920s, at the beginning of the sound era Perilli joined the new Cines studios, where he served as production designer and then as assistant director to Mario Camerini. In 1933, he directed his first feature film, Ragazzo (Boy). Despite recounting the relatively edifying story of a street kid whose criminal behavior is eventually reformed by time in a Fascist youth camp, Ragazzo became one of the few films to be completely banned by the Fascist authorities, its total prohibition coming from Benito Mussolini himself. Perilli directed two other minor films in the early 1940s, Margherita fra i tre (Margherita and Her Three Uncles, 1942) and La primadonna (The First Soprano, 1943), but for the most part, he worked as a regular screenwriter (and sometimes assistant director) on a dozen of Camerini’s subsequent films, including Il cappello a tre punte (Three-Cornered Hat, 1935), Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935), I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939), and I promessi sposi (The Spirit and the Flesh, 1941). In the period following World War II, he collaborated as a screenwriter with many of the leading directors: with Camerini again on a half dozen films including Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945), La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, 1956), and I briganti italiani (Seduction of the South, 1962); with Roberto Rossellini on Europa ’51 (The Greatest Love, 1952); with Giuseppe De Santis on Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949); and with Alberto Lattuada on Anna (1952). He also worked with American directors such as Martin Ritt on 5 Branded Women (Jovanka e le altre, 1960) and Richard Fleisher on Barabbas (1961). Following his work on the screenplay of John Huston’s The Bible: The Beginning (1966), however, he largely retired from the cinema, returning only to supply the treatment and screenplay for Luigi Comencini’s Mio dio come sono caduta in basso! (Till Marriage Do Us Part, 1974).

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PETRAGLIA, SANDRO (1947–). Screenwriter. For much of his professional career, Petraglia has worked together with Franco Rulli to form one of the most prolific and respected screenwriting team in Italian cinema in the last four decades. With a background in film criticism, Petraglia collaborated with Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, and Rulli in writing and directing Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1975), a three-hour documentary on Italian mental asylums, and La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine), a five-part series on the seamier aspects of the Italian film industry that was broadcast on national television in 1979. He subsequently worked on the screenplays of Nanni Moretti’s Bianca (Sweet Body of Bianca, 1983) and La messa è finita (The Mass Is Ended, 1985) before teaming up again with Rulli to write several successful television miniseries, including Attentato al papa (Attempt on the Pope’s Life, 1986) and four seasons of the popular and long-running series on the Mafia, La piovra (Octopus, 1987–1992). Regularly working together from then on, Petraglia and Rulli scripted many of the key films of the emerging directors of the New Italian Cinema, including Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Mary Forever, 1989), Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), and Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). While continuing to write for the big screen and producing the screenplays of films such as Marco Tullio Giordana’s Pasolini un delitto italiano (Pasolini, an Italian Crime, 1995) and Francesco Rosi’s La tregua (The Truce, 1997), they also worked extensively for television in the late 1990s, writing quality miniseries such as La vita che verrà (The Life to Come, 1999). In 2003, the duo achieved their greatest triumph with Marco Tullio Giordana’s much-acclaimed six-hour epic La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which they received the David di Donatello, the Nastro d’argento, and the Italian Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Petraglia collaborated once again with Rulli on Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005) and Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005), the latter earning them another shared David di Donatello screenwriting award. In the following decade, Petraglia continued to work with Rulli on some dozen other films and television series, including Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007), which earned them another David; Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, 2012); Gabriele Salvatores’s Educazione siberiana (Deadly Code, 2013); and Stefano Sollima’s Suburra (2015). Petraglia has most recently collaborated, without Rulli, on the screenplay of Luchetti’s Io sono Tempesta (I Am Tempesta, 2018).

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PETRI, ELIO (1929–1982). Journalist, screenwriter, and director. A journalist and film reviewer for the Communist Party daily L’unità, Elio Petri, born Eraclio Petri, graduated to writing for the cinema in 1951 when he was invited by director Giuseppe De Santis to collaborate on the screenplay of Roma ore 11 (Rome 11:00, 1952). While continuing to work as a screenwriter for De Santis and others, Petri also made several documentaries before directing his first feature, L’assassino (The Assassin, 1961), an intriguing police thriller starring Marcello Mastroianni that was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin. This was followed by 1 giorni contati (Numbered Days, 1962), an interesting portrayal of an existential midlife crisis, and La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965), a science fiction story set in the 21st century that, with a harried Marcello Mastroianni being hunted down by a beautiful Ursula Andress, appeared to be part James Bond, part Hitchcock, and part George Orwell. A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way, 1967), adapted from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia and ostensibly about the Mafia but effectively exploring wider legal and illegal power networks in Italy, was hailed as a major work and won four Nastri d’argento and a nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes. Then, after the ironically titled Un tranquillo posto di campagna (A Quiet Place in the Country, 1969), with Franco Nero playing a disturbed artist tormented by both ghosts and hallucinations, Petri made what is widely regarded as his best film, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1970). The first of a series of strongly committed political works displaying an open distrust, and often outright cynicism, toward all established authority, the film was both commercially and critically successful and went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The caricatural and slightly hysterical style that had characterized Indagine returned in La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1971), a film that was fiercely attacked for what appeared to be its very confused pro-workerist ideology but nevertheless was awarded the Palme d’or at Cannes and the David di Donatello for Best Film at home. The same mixture of caricature and black humor reappeared in La proprietà non è più un furto (Property Is No Longer a Theft, 1973) and then Todo modo (1976), a mercilessly grotesque but transparent portrait of the ruling Christian Democrat Party, again adapted from a work by Sciascia. After Le mani sporche (Soiled Hands, 1978), a production of Jean Paul Sartre’s play of the same name for Italian television, Petri’s last film before his untimely death from cancer at the age of only 53 was Le buone notizie (Good News, 1979), another grotesque social satire, this time directed at the Italian television industry. PETROLINI, ETTORE (1886–1936). Actor and playwright. Taking to the stage at the age of 14, Petrolini achieved enormous national and international renown as a performer of cabaret and musical theater, touring extensively

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throughout Europe and the Americas. Despite his huge popularity over three decades, he appeared only twice in films during the silent period: in a brief comic sketch for Latium films in 1913 and in Mario Bonnard’s Mentre il pubblico ride (While the Public Laughs, 1919). However, in 1930 Alessandro Blasetti filmed a performance of his stage show Nerone (Nero, 1930) as one of the earliest Italian sound films, and a year later Carlo Campogalliani also recorded him on film in performances of Cortile (Courtyard, 1931) and Medico per forza (1931), an Italian version of Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself). Although Petrolini’s lampoon of the Roman emperor in Nerone appeared to many as a thinly veiled reference to Benito Mussolini, such was his overwhelming popularity at the time that the film was allowed to circulate freely and Mussolini himself is said to have been amused by it. PIAVOLI, FRANCO (1933–). Painter, photographer, cinematographer, writer, and director. Now recognized as one of the great figures of Italian documentary filmmaking in the postwar period, Piavoli graduated in law from the University of Pavia and practiced as a lawyer for several years while still cultivating a strong interest in painting and photography. In the early 1960s, having abandoned the legal profession in favor of teaching legal studies at a technical institute, he began to use an 8 mm camera to film the area in the countryside near Brescia, where he was born and raised. The result was a series of finely observed documentaries that won prizes when screened in local film festivals, which Piavoli would later collect under the justified rubric of “Poesie in 8 mm” (Poems in 8 mm): Stagioni (Seasons, 1961), Domenica sera (Sunday Evening, 1962), Emigranti (Migrants, 1963), and Evasi (Escaped, 1964). After appearing, reluctantly, to voice his ideas about cinema in La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine, 1978), a documentary series made for RAI television and directed by, among others, the already established filmmaker and fellow Brescian Silvano Agosti, Piavoli accepted Agosti’s offer of a 35 mm camera, an editing Moviola, and his fervent injunction to go and make a feature documentary. With Agosti acting as producer, Piavoli labored for more than two years in order to deliver his first, and much-acclaimed, full-length feature, Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet, 1982). A paean to Nature and to human beings’ place within it, meticulously and masterfully constructed as a veritable symphony of images and natural sounds, the film was screened in competition at the Venice Festival that year, receiving high praise locally and eliciting international recognition. Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, as a member of the jury at Venice that year, mailed Piavoli his compliments in writing, characterizing the film as “a poem, journey, concert on nature, the universe, life itself.”

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In the wake of the success and recognition of the brilliance of The Blue Planet, Piavoli nevertheless returned to the short documentary form with his Lucidi inganni (1986), a magical exploration of the Ducal Palace of Mantova by moonlight, before crafting his second full-length feature, the fictional Nostos—il ritorno (Nostos—the Return, 1989), a stunningly poetic revisitation of the myth of Ulysses and his forever-delayed return to his personal but, as the film suggested, also metaphysical origins. Seven years later, Piavoli’s third feature, Voci nel tempo (Voices in Time, 1996), was his Stagioni painted on a grander canvas, with the seasons, the time of the day, and the ages of man all braided together in one audiovisual hymn to time, human life, and the endurance of humankind enfolded within nature. The overarching optimism of this vision, although not the beauty of the natural world, came to be severely undermined by the more melancholic air of Al primo soffio del vento (At the First Breath of Wind, 2002), a film conveying the lassitude of a postprandial summer afternoon in rural Italy, with extended human silences standing out against the reassuring cacophony of nature, speaking of nothing less than regret, decay, and lack of communication. Two years later, as if to overturn this negative vision in turn, Piavoli made Affettuosa presenza (Affectionate Presence, 2004), an evocation of the warm friendship between the 20th-century Mantuan poet Umberto Bellintani and his peer, Florentine poet Alessandro Parronchi, constructed through their poems and their cordial exchange of letters. In 2009, responding to a request from his friend and fellow filmmaker Ermanno Olmi to contribute to the compilation documentary Terra Madre (2009), Piavoli made the 25-minute L’orto di Flora (Flora’s Vegetable Garden). By this time having become something of the grand old man of Italian documentary, in 2010 he was presented with the Medal of the President of the Republic. In 2016, the Pompidou Center of Paris hosted a comprehensive retrospective of all his films. In the same year, he presented his mediumlength Festa (2016), a celebration of life, feast, and dancing, at the Locarno Film Festival. PICCIONI, GIUSEPPE (1953–). Director and screenwriter. Piccioni began making short films in the early 1980s while studying at the Gaumont Film School in Rome. In 1985, after working for a period in advertising, he helped establish the Vertigo Film production company, which produced his first feature, Il grande Blek (The Mighty Blek, 1987). A warmhearted if melancholic coming-of-age film, Blek was much acclaimed when presented in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and in Italy, it received both a Nastro d’argento and the De Sica Prize for Young Cinema. There followed the romantic road movie Chiedi la luna (Ask for the Moon, 1991), the more cynical Condannato a nozze (Condemned to Wed, 1993), and Cuori al verde (Penniless Hearts, 1996), a bittersweet comedy about midlife crises. In 1999,

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Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World, 1999), a moving tale about the profound spiritual transformation wrought on the lives of several people by the discovery of an abandoned baby, won five David di Donatello and four Ciak d’oro awards and became the Italian nominee for Best Foreign Film at that year’s Oscars. Two years later, the intense love story Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes, 2001) deeply divided the critics but was nevertheless nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, with both its leads also receiving the prestigious Volpi Cup and the Pasinetti Award. In the new millennium, Piccioni continued to explore the power and depth of human feelings in La vita che vorrei (The Life I Want, 2004), a romantic melodrama that also cleverly and continually blurred the boundaries between cinematic illusion and real life, and Giulia non esce la sera (Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night, 2009), a film tracing the timid love affair that develops between an insecure would-be writer and a young woman serving a prison sentence for murder but allowed out on day leave. In a somewhat playful and lighter vein, Il rosso e il blu (The Red and the Blue, 2012), followed a young man’s first posting as a teacher in a contemporary Italian high school. After also following the progress of students in Esercizi elementary (Basic Exercises, 2014), a documentary recording a year of study at Rome’s National School of Dramatic Art, Piccioni returned to explore the maelstrom of young emotions in four young women on the threshold of adulthood in Questi giorni (These Days, 2016). PICCIONI, PIERO (1921–2004). Jazz musician, orchestra director, and film composer. Piccioni was launched on a musical career in his teens when he was hired as a solo pianist to play live in a weekly program on national Italian radio. Profoundly influenced by the music of Duke Ellington, he soon formed his own jazz orchestra, which, as the “013” Big Band, was the first orchestra to play live on Italian radio after the announcement of the fall of Fascism. At the end of the 1940s, he lived for a period in the United States, where he met and played with jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Max Roach. Back in Italy, he worked briefly as a lawyer before beginning to compose music for films in the early 1950s, originally under the stage name of Piero Morgan. His first feature film score was for Gianni Franciolini’s Il mondo le condanna (The World Condemns Them, 1953), which was soon followed by music for Alberto Lattuada’s La spiaggia (Riviera, 1954). After scoring, among others, Dino Risi’s two popular romantic teen comedies, Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1957) and Belle ma povere (Pretty but Poor, 1957), he began to use his own name while working on Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (The Magliari, 1959). He subsequently scored all of Rosi’s films, winning the Nastro d’argento for the stark and unnerving sound design of Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962).

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For the next 25 years, Piccioni worked extensively in both popular and auteur cinema, moving easily between sword-and-sandal epics such as Il figlio di Spartaco (The Slave, 1962) and auteur films such as Luchino Visconti’s Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967). He formed an especially close professional relationship with Alberto Sordi and scored practically all the films that Sordi appeared in or directed, from the early Fumo di Londra (Smoke over London, 1966) to Sordi’s final film, Incontri proibiti (Forbidden Encounters, 1998). In the 1970s, beginning with Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimì, 1972), he also frequently worked with Lina Wertmüller and received the David di Donatello for his score of Wertmüller’s Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away, 1974). Having composed music for close to 200 films, in 1996 he was awarded the prestigious Flaiano International Prize for his entire career. PIERACCIONI, LEONARDO (1965–). Actor, director, screenwriter, and novelist. After achieving significant popularity as a cabaret performer and hosting a number of television variety shows, Pieraccioni appeared in several small roles in minor films in the early 1990s before being fortuitously presented with the opportunity to make a feature film. The result was I laureati (Graduates, 1995), the story of the hopes and loves of four self-indulgent students who share an apartment in Florence, the lead being played by Pieraccioni himself. The film was critically panned, but its unexpected and enormous box office success allowed Pieraccioni to go on to make Il ciclone (The Cyclone, 1996), a racy comedy focused on a small troupe of beautiful Spanish flamenco dancers who descend on a sleepy town in Tuscany, thereby provoking the storm of excited reactions that gives the film its title. As before, the film was not only popular but also broke all previous Italian box office records and received two Nastro d’argento and three David di Donatello awards, thus confirming Pieraccioni’s reputation as a viable director. Always in partnership with screenwriter Giovanni Veronesi, Pieraccioni subsequently made Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1997); Il mio West (Gunslinger’s Revenge, 1998), an amusing if rather familiar take on the Western and exploiting the well-known faces of Harvey Keitel and David Bowie; Il pesce innamorato (The Fish in Love, 1999); and Il principe e il pirata (The Prince and the Pirate, 2001), a road movie involving two childhood friends who eventually discover that they are actually siblings. After Il Paradiso all’improvviso (Suddenly Paradise, 2003), again critically panned but enormously successful at the box office, Pieraccioni directed Ti amo in tutte le lingue del mondo (I Love You in Every Language, 2005). While undoubtedly tending to repetition in characterization and use of the familiar formulas of romantic comedy, the films in which he has regularly directed himself in the last decade, Una moglie bellissima (A Very Beautiful

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Wife, 2007), Io e Marilyn (Me and Marilyn, 2009), Finalmente la felicità (Happiness Finally, 2011), Un fantastico via vai (Fantastic Comings and Goings, 2013), and Il professor Cenerontolo (Professor Cinderella, 2015), although often critically undervalued, have also continued to fare extremely well at the Italian box office, a confirmation that comedy remains the ultimate drawing card for Italian audiences. In what may be something of a summing up, in his most recent Se son rose (If They Are Roses, 2018), the 15-year-old daughter of Leonardo, the 40-year-old protagonist of the film, played, as always, by Pieraccioni himself, decides to attempt to rejuvenate her jaded father by secretly e-mailing all his former lovers in order to suggest a reunion. PIETRANGELI, ANTONIO (1919–1968). Critic, screenwriter, and director. Pietrangeli graduated in medicine but preferred to write literary and film criticism and so became one of the militant young cineastes associated with the journal Cinema who came to assist Luchino Visconti in making Ossessione (1943). After the war, he continued to contribute to film journals but also collaborated as screenwriter on a number of films, including Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1948) and Alessandro Blasetti’s Fabiola (1949), before directing his first solo film, Il sole negli occhi (Empty Eyes, 1953). The first of many of his works to privilege female characters and to highlight the vulnerable position of women in a traditional Italian society, the film was awarded a special Nastro d’argento for a directorial debut. After Souvenir d’Italie (It Happened in Rome, 1957), an amusing saga of foreign girls finding love and romance in sunny Italy, he made Adua e le sue compagne (Hungry for Love, 1960), a warmhearted film that followed the efforts of four former prostitutes who, in the wake of the 1958 law that closed the brothels in Italy, attempt to establish a restaurant together but continue to be stymied by prejudice and hypocrisy on account of their past. This was followed by a number of other finely crafted female portraits in La parmigiana (The Girl from Parma, 1963), La visita (The Visitor, 1964), and then by what is generally regarded as his most powerful and moving film, Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1965). Starring Stefania Sandrelli in one of her finest early roles, the film received the Nastro d’argento for both direction and writing. Tragically, soon after, while still at the peak of his creative powers, Pietrangeli was killed in a boating accident off the island of Gaeta while filming Come, quando, perché (How, When, and with Whom, 1969). The film was subsequently completed by Valerio Zurlini. PINELLI, TULLIO (1908–2009). Playwright and screenwriter. After graduating in jurisprudence, Pinelli alternated between practicing as a lawyer and writing plays, becoming, by the early 1940s, one of Italy’s most respected

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playwrights. At this time, he also began working as a screenwriter, one of his first efforts being the screenplay of Mario Bonnard’s Campo de’ Fiori (The Peddler and the Lady, 1943), which he cowrote with Federico Fellini. In the immediate postwar period, Pinelli collaborated extensively with Alberto Lattuada, helping to write Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946), Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948), and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948), and worked with Pietro Germi on In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1949) and Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950) before collaborating again with both Fellini and Lattuada on Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950). From then on, usually together with Ennio Flaiano, he worked as Fellini’s regular screenwriter on all the latter’s major films up to Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), which included La dolce vita (1960), for which he shared an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story, a success repeated with Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). After a number of years away from Fellini, during which he worked again with Pietro Germi as well as with Antonio Pietrangeli, Liliana Cavani, and Mario Monicelli, he returned to write Fellini’s last two films, Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986) and La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990). He subsequently retired from screenwriting but, in 1998, published his first novel, La casa di Robespierre (Robespierre’s House) followed a decade later, by an anthology of short stories, Innamorarsi (Falling in Love, 2008). PIOVANI, NICOLA (1946–). Pianist, orchestra director, and composer for film and theater. After graduating from the Conservatory of Milan in 1967, Piovani worked as a pianist and song arranger before studying composition under Manos Hadjidakis. He began composing for film in the early 1970s, writing his first scores for Silvano Agosti’s N.P. il segreto (NP, 1971) and Marco Bellocchio’s Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father, 1971). He subsequently scored six other films for Bellocchio, including Marcia trionfale (Victory March, 1976) and Salta nel vuoto (Leap into the Void, 1980) while also working regularly on the films of Mario Monicelli and Nanni Moretti; his scores for Moretti’s Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993) and La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001) were both awarded the David di Donatello. Piovani also collaborated extensively with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, creating the haunting soundtracks of all the Tavianis’ films from La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) to Tu ridi (You’re Laughing, 1998), and proved to be a worthy successor to Nino Rota in providing the music for Federico Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986), Intervista (Fellini’s Intervista, 1987), and La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990).

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Piovani has also worked with a host of foreign directors including Dusan Makavejev, Bigas Luna, and Ben Verbong. In addition to film music, he has written songs, chamber music, musical comedy, and ballet and orchestra suites and has been prolific in music for theatrical productions. In 1991, together with writer Vincenzo Cerami, Piovani founded the musical theater company La Compagnia della Luna (The Company of the Moon), which has continued to tour widely, performing his compositions. A recipient of numerous honors and prizes, his greatest triumph to date has been the Oscar he received for the score of Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1998). After scoring in the vicinity of 80 further films and TV series, in 2015 he was presented with the Soundtrack Stars Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival. PIRRO, UGO (1920–2008). Journalist, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. A respected and socially committed writer who continued to alternate between literature and cinema throughout his career, Pirro (born Ugo Mattone) began in films with a collaboration on the story and screenplay of Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951). He subsequently worked extensively with Lizzani, writing or cowriting six more films for him, including Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial, 1963), and Celluloide (Celluloid, 1996), which he adapted from his own novel of the same name. At the same time, he also worked with a host of other leading Italian directors, among them Antonio Pietrangeli, Giuseppe De Santis, Luciano Emmer, Mauro Bolognini, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Luigi Comencini. With his screenplay for A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way, 1967), he initiated a strong professional partnership with Elio Petri, for whom he wrote several more key films, including Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1970), which brought him the Nastro d’argento for Best Story as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. In 1972, he received a second Oscar nomination for his work on the screenplay of Vittorio De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1970). He also worked with directors outside Italy, adapting his own novel Jovanka e le altre for Martin Ritt’s 5 Branded Women (1960) and helping to write Veljko Bulajic’s epic war movie Bitka na Neretvi (The Battle of Neretva, 1969). After publishing the screenwriting manual Per scrivere un film in 1982, he gradually reduced his involvement in films in order to pursue his literary activities and, in the late 1980s, worked more regularly for television. He returned to writing for the big screen with his screenplay for Alessandro De Robilant’s Il giudice ragazzino (The Boy Judge, 1994), a film about the young judge Rosario Livatino, murdered by the Sicilian Mafia in 1990.

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In 2004, in recognition of his contribution to Italian cinema, Pirro was presented with the Vittorio De Sica Prize by the president of the Italian Republic. PISORNO. Studio. Founded in 1934 by the multitalented Giovacchino Forzano (journalist, playwright, film director, and erstwhile librettist for Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni), with the strong support of the Fascist government and financial backing from the Turin Agnelli family, the Pisorno studios quickly grew to become, for a time, the major film production venue in Italy of the interwar period. Designed and built by noted architect and scenographer Antonio Valente, on 200,000 square meters of newly reclaimed land in the district of Tirrenia, halfway between Pisa and Livorno (hence the name alluding to both cities), the facility housed six well-equipped sound studios surrounded by other buildings covering all aspects of the filmmaking process, from actors’ dressing rooms to film processing workshops. The studio was so modern, integrated, and technically well furnished that for a period it became known colloquially as Hollywood on the Arno. Notwithstanding its coming to be supplanted by Cinecittà once the Roman studio was opened in 1937, it attracted many of the most prominent filmmakers of the period, including Mario Bonnard, Gennaro Righelli, Eduardo De Filippo, Carlo Campogalliani, Mario Mattoli, Goffredo Alessandrini, and Mario Soldati, producing more than 80 films before 1943 when it was first requisitioned by the retreating Germans, then partly bombed and eventually taken over and used by the American military. In 1949, Forzano was able to revive the facilities, and for a decade, the Pisorno studios returned to active filmmaking. In 1952, Andrea Forzano, son of Giovacchino, helped blacklisted American director Joseph Losey produce Stranger on the Prowl (Imbarco a Mezzanotte, 1952) there before Forzano himself directed a host of light comedies and screen musicals featuring popular singing idols Claudio Villa and Luciano Tajoli. During the period, the studio garnered enough of an international reputation for it to be visited by English producer Henry Saltzman, who was looking for a place to make the first of a projected series of films drawn from the spy novels of Ian Flemming. Nevertheless the studio’s fortunes declined, and in 1959 Pisorno was declared bankrupt. A year later, producer Carlo Ponti bought the facilities and renamed the studios Cosmopolitan, attempting to use the new company to relaunch the career of Sophia Loren in films like Christian-Jaque’s Madame Sans-Gêne (Madame, 1961) and Vittorio De Sica’s I sequestrati d’Altona (The Condemned of Altona, 1962). Ponti’s new studio also attracted a number of the other established directors to come and work at Tirrenia, among them Marco Ferreri, to make La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1963); Mario Monicelli, to film Casanova ’70 (1965); and Elio Petri, to shoot La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965). Legendary French direc-

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tor Abel Gance came to shoot one of his last films, Cyrano et D’Artagnan, at Ponti’s studio in 1964. By the end of the decade, however, Ponti himself was admitting in interviews that the competition from Cinecittà was too strong, and Cosmopolitan closed its doors in 1969; the last film made there was Mauro Bolognini’s L’assoluto naturale (She and He, 1969). The facilities received a momentary revival in 1987 when Paolo and Vittorio Taviani returned nostalgically to what had become a derelict property in order to shoot Good morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon). The area was subsequently developed into a five-star tourist resort with hotels, apartments, and a golf course where the soundstages had stood. PITTALUGA, STEFANO (1887–1931). Distributor, exhibitor, and producer. Beginning in the period immediately prior to World War I as just one more entrepreneur jostling for a place in the sun of a booming Italian film industry, Pittaluga would go on to become the single most important figure in the development of the Italian cinema during the 1920s. Indeed, the very shape of the Italian film industry in the 1930s may have looked very different had the plans and projects carefully prepared by Pittaluga not been brought to an abrupt end by his untimely death in 1931. Pittaluga first emerged in the industry in 1914 as an enterprising young film distributor holding exclusive rights over the Piemonte region for the films of several major Italian production companies (Celio, Cines, Milano Films, and Aquila) as well as the French Pathé and other foreign companies. At the same time, showing a keen awareness of the importance of controlling exhibition, he acquired a number of cinemas in Genova. By 1920, he had a chain of more than 200 theaters throughout northern and central Italy. His firm remained outside the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI; Italian Cinematographic Union) and, by a clever policy of distribution of foreign films, especially American, continued to flourish even as the fortunes of most of the members of the UCI declined. In 1924, as many of the other companies either severely reduced their production or ceased it altogether, Pittaluga bought up Fert, a small company that had remained independent of the UCI, and began to produce a closely calculated number of films, including the last series of popular films featuring Maciste (Maciste e il nipote d’America [Maciste and the Nephew from America, 1924], Maciste all’inferno [Maciste in Hell, 1926], Maciste contro lo sceicco [Maciste and the Sheik], 1926), which, astutely, he had already presold abroad. In 1926, as the UCI was being liquidated, Pittaluga’s company secured all of the UCI’s assets, including cinemas, distribution networks, and studios (including the Roman studios of the Cines), thus bringing under its control almost all that remained of the Italian film industry at that time. In 1927, with great foresight, he began to equip his theaters for sound and the Rome Cines studios with Photophone RCA sound recording equipment. The Pittaluga cinemas

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were consequently the first to screen The Jazz Singer in 1929, and the first Italian sound film, La canzone dell’amore (The Love Song, 1930), was made at the Rome Cines studios, which henceforth became the major center of film production in the country. By this stage, having achieved a significant degree of vertical integration, Pittaluga’s company was beginning to approach the model of an American major. Also by this time, as the head of the industry in Italy, Pittaluga had begun to lobby the government for some significant support for the industry, to which Benito Mussolini assented and then effectively provided by means of a decree in 1930. Before the law was proclaimed in 1931, however, Pittaluga died, leaving a vacuum that would only begin to be filled several years later with the Fascist government’s creation of a unified bureau for cinematography (Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia) under the headship of Luigi Freddi. PLACIDO, MICHELE (1946–). Theater and film actor and director. Born in a small town in Puglia, Placido moved to Rome in his late teens in order to pursue an acting career. After graduating from the National Academy for Dramatic Art, Placido made his stage debut in Luca Ronconi’s landmark production of Orlando Furioso in 1969. While continuing to work extensively in the theater in the early 1970s, he also began appearing in films, one of his first notable roles being that of the young man recruited to the Mafia in the made-for-television Il piccioto (The Young Man, 1973). He then appeared as Ugo Tognazzi’s handsome young rival in Mario Monicelli’s Romanzo popolare (Come Home and Meet My Wife, 1974) before playing the more demanding lead role in Marco Bellocchio’s Marcia trionfale (Victory March, 1976), for which he received both the Nastro d’argento and a Special David di Donatello. Returning to the theater, he acted the role of Caliban in a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest directed by Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan in 1978 before coming back to the screen in strong performances in, among others, Carlo Lizzani’s Fontamara (1980) and Francesco Rosi’s Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981). He subsequently turned to television and became one of the best-recognized and most-loved faces in Italy playing the part of Inspector Cattani in the first four seasons of the popular and long-running television Mafia series La piovra (Octopus, 1984–1989). While providing more powerful performances in socially committed films such as Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Forever Mary, 1983) and Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994), he also made his own directorial debut in 1990 with Pummarò (Tomato, 1990), one of the first films to focus on the plight of clandestine immigrants in Italy. This was followed by Le amiche del cuore (Close Friends, 1992), which courageously tackled the difficult theme of incest, and Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero, 1995), a portrait of financial lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli, who was killed in 1979 while investigating links

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between politics and organized crime in the so-called Sindona Affair. The film’s expression of a strong sense of civic duty earned Placido a second Special David di Donatello. After Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love, 1998) and Un viaggio chiamato amore (A Journey Called Love, 2002), the story of the tortured love affair between poet Dino Campana and writer Sibilla Aleramo, Placido directed what remains one of his most impressive works to date, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005). A long but fast-paced gangster epic detailing the rise and fall of the notorious Magliana Gang in Rome in the 1970s, it won eight David di Donatello and seven Nastri d’argento as well as a nomination for the Berlin Golden Bear. Returning in front of the camera, in 2006 Placido appeared in six films, including being the corrupt secret service head, Ferruccio Anedda, in Arrivederci amore ciao (The Goodbye Kiss, 2006) and the repulsive pimp Muffa in Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 2006). After also acting as the notorious Mafia boss, Bernardo Provenzano, in Marco Risi’s made-for-television L’ultimo padrino (The Last Godfather, 2008), he moved behind the camera again to direct the semiautobiographical Il grande sogno (The Big Dream, 2009), a film about the 1968 movement Placido had himself lived through when he had first arrived in Rome, ironically first as a green police recruit and later as a protesting student. This was followed by Vallanzasca—i fiori del male (Angel of Evil, 2010), a dramatic portrait of the ruthless but charismatic leader of the most feared criminal gang operating in Milan in the 1970s, before his first French direction, the hard-edged police thriller Le guetteur (The Lookout, 2012). Lured back to his first love, the theater, he directed a production of Luigi Pirandello’s Così è (se vi pare) [Right You Are If You Think So] at the Teatro Eliseo of Rome before taking the lead in Massimiliano Bruno’s black comedy Viva l’Italia (Long Live Italy, 2012). After starring as the genial 19thcentury Roman poet Trilussa in the elegant made-for-television biopic Trilussa—storia d’amore e poesia (Trilussa—Story of Love and Poetry, 2013) and then appearing as head of one of the Mafia families in the RAI miniseries Questo è mio paese (This Is My Town, 2015), he was drawn back to the theater, directing himself as King Lear in a production at Milan’s Piccolo Theater. Forever alternating between stage and screen, he then returned behind the camera to direct La scelta (The Choice, 2015) and 7 Minuti (7 Minutes, 2016), a strangely compelling and moving film revolving around a decision to be taken by a group of female workers and union representatives in a textile factory undergoing a company takeover. After also directing the first two episodes of the first season of the Netflix series Suburra—la serie (Suburra: Blood of Rome, 2017), he again turned to the stage to direct and act in an Italian adaptation of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s play Petits crimes conjugaux (Piccoli crimini coniugali, 2019).

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POGGIOLI, FERDINANDO MARIA (1897–1945). Director, editor, and screenwriter. Having begun as an assistant editor at the newly revamped Cines studios, Poggioli soon contributed to the documentary series initiated under the directorship of Emilio Cecchi with Il presepio (The Nativity, 1932) and Paestum (1932). At the same time, he served as assistant director to Baldassare Negroni on the very popular Due cuori felici (Two Happy Hearts, 1932) and thereafter worked as editor on a number of films, including Max Ophüls’s La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman, 1934). Poggioli’s first attempt at directing, under the supervision of Negroni, was Arma bianca (Cold Steel, 1936), the adaptation of a play on the life of Giacomo Casanova by Alessandro De Stefani. After a further period of working as an editor, he made his first solo direction in 1939 with Ricchezza senza domani (Wealth without a Future, 1940), which told the rather curious story of an industrialist who resolves his marital crisis by donating his factory to his workers. His third feature was Addio giovinezza! (Farewell, Youth, 1940), a lively but melancholic evocation of student life and first love in Turin in the early years of the 20th century, adapting a popular play by Sandro Camasio and Nino Oxilia that had already been filmed three times during the silent period. Poggioli’s close attention to the formal qualities of the film’s visual composition immediately placed him in the camp of the socalled calligraphers. There followed a period of intense productive activity with Sissignora (Yes, Madam, 1941); La morte civile (Civil Death, 1942); La bisbettica domata, an inventive adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew set in contemporary Rome; and what many still believe was Poggioli’s most accomplished film, Gelosia (Jealousy, 1942), adapted from a novel by Luigi Capuana. His last two films were also adaptations: Il cappello da prete (The Priest’s Hat, 1944), a dark drama of murder and remorse adapted from a 19th-century novel by Emilio De Marchi, and Le sorelle Materassi (The Materassi Sisters, 1944), an exceptionally fine rendition of one of Aldo Palazzeschi’s best-known novels, with the renowned stage actresses Emma and Irma Grammatica playing the lead roles. The film marked something of a high-water mark in Poggioli’s cinematic production. However, what promised to be a stellar career was unexpectedly brought to an end by Poggioli’s tragic death in February 1945 in an accident involving gas. The field has continued to remain divided between those who claim it was a domestic mishap and those who assert that it was willful suicide. POLIZIESCO (-ALL’ITALIANA; POLIZIOTTESCO). Genre. Police crime action-thriller. As the popularity of the Spaghetti Western began to wane in the early 1970s, Italian screens came to be occupied by a series of generally small-budget, high-action crime thrillers featuring rogue cops, violent criminals, graphic violence, and spectacular car chases in a tight and

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repeated combination that heralded the emergence of a new subgenre of the police crime drama or poliziesco, but which hostile critics would later dub, with pejorative intent, poliziottesco (cop film). The 1970s in Italy saw a dramatic increase in crime and violence on the streets of all the major cities, and the new genre, flourishing precisely during the years of what are remembered as the anni di piombo (leaden years), appeared to be effectively reflecting on-screen what Italians were seeing around them in their daily lives. By the same token, as an actor like Tomas Milian, who starred in both Spaghetti Westerns and poliziotteschi, once observed, the poliziottesco was also, as cinematic spectacle, an urban transposition of the tropes of the Spaghetti Western, with ruthless police commissioners in the place of merciless bounty hunters, cars instead of horses, car chases instead of posses, and the asphalt jungle of the city replacing the badlands of the West. This filiation from the Western is made explicit in the genre itself when Umberto Lenzi’s Il trucido e lo sbirro (Free Hand for a Tough Cop, 1976), regarded as a classic of the genre, actually rolls its entire credit sequence over what seems to be a fullblown Western, with almost two minutes passing before the film really begins as the camera tracks back from a screen to reveal that we’ve been watching a Western film in the company of the criminal inmates of a modern prison. It has become customary to locate the first emergence of the genre in Steno’s La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad, 1972) although it is also generally acknowledged that, for all of its distinctive form, Steno’s film clearly draws together elements that had already appeared in earlier films such as Carlo Lizzani’s Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four, 1968), Elio Petri’s Indagine di un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1970), and Damiano Damiani’s Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della Repubblica (Confessions of a Police Captain, 1971). Perhaps the film that more effectively introduces in nuce the generic formula that would later characterize so many exemplars of the genre is Enzo G. Castellari’s La polizia incrimina, la legge assolve (High Crime, 1973), not least for the propensity of its protagonist, Deputy Commissioner Belli (Franco Nero), to bypass legalities and resort to naked violence in dealing with criminals, but also in the extraordinary six-minute car chase that occurs in the first few minutes of the film, foreshadowing the place of the car chase as a set piece of the genre. A year later, Castellari’s Il cittadino si ribella (Street Law, 1974), again starring Franco Nero, exemplified another theme that would insistently appear in the genre, that of the ordinary citizen, faced with the police’s incompetence or complicity in dealing with crime, forced to take matters into their own hands. There could nevertheless be a wide variety in the 250 or so films that were produced in the decade during which the genre flourished—one historian has actually written about the “thousand faces” of the Italian poliziesco—al-

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though a strong coherence came to be achieved by many of the films coming to be made by the same directors, generally using the same screenwriters and actors. Among the directors who came to specialize in the genre were Stelvio Massi, who made 16 of the most action-packed films of the genre; Fernando di Leo, who made 10, including the great classic Milano calibro 9 (Caliber 9, 1972); and Umberto Lenzi, who not only contributed 10 films to the genre—among them the classic Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare (Almost Human, 1974)—but also helped innovate it with the creation of the character of the disheveled and foul-mouthed petty criminal “Er Monnezza” (Mr. Trash) in Il trucido e lo sbirro (Free Hand for a Tough Cop, 1976), gleefully played by Tomas Milian. Bruno Corbucci came to dominate the genre in its latter phase with a dozen comic films in which Police Inspector Nico Giraldi, always played by Milian, displays all the personal characteristics of Monnezza while being on the side of the law. Milian thus came to be one of the major regular actors of the genre, along with Franco Nero, Luc Merenda, and Enrico Maria Salerno. However, for most Italians, the iconic face of the tough, steely eyed commissioner bending the rules to punish crime, characteristic of the genre, remains that of Maurizio Merli, who played some variation of his Commissioner Betti, first appearing in Marino Girolamo’s Roma violenta (Violent City, 1975) in 15 subsequent films. Either ignored by critics, or attacked for a putative glorification of violence and a fascistic promotion of vigilantism, the genre nevertheless did well at the Italian box office and was widely sold internationally. One downside of its extensive international distribution, however, apart from the usual ludicrous dubbing, was the frequent disappearance of the exact reference in many titles locating the action of the films in specific cities, with Lenzi’s Roma a mano armata (1976) becoming The Tough Ones or Brutal Justice, and Milano odia: La polizia non può sparare being rendered as Almost Human or The Executioner. Arguably, in their original Italian, these references not only made the films more attractive to Italian audiences but, by allowing identification and recognition, also carried out a certain denunciatory function, thus aligning the genre with more auteurist political cinema. Although the genre did undoubtedly decline on the big screen by the mid1980s, returning only sporadically in a film like Claudio Caligari’s L’odore della notte (The Scent of the Night, 1998), it has been argued that in those years it effectively migrated to television where it continued in crime series like La piovra (1984–2001). More recently many have seen a return of the genre to the big screen in the new millennium in films such as Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005), Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008), Stefano Sollima’s A.C.A.B.—All Cops Are Bastards (2012), and, in particular, Gianluca Petrazzi’s declared homage to the

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genre in his feature debut, Roma criminale (2013). Already, in something of an official rehabilitation, in 2004 the Venice Festival hosted a retrospective of six classics of the genre in its Special section, “Italian Kings of the B’s.” PONTECORVO, GILLO (1919–2006). Journalist, photographer, and director. One of Italy’s most politically committed filmmakers, Pontecorvo was born into a large and wealthy Jewish family in Pisa. He began studying chemistry at the local university but, following the proclamation of race laws in 1938, went to Paris, where he took up journalism and cultivated an interest in photography. In 1941, having become a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he returned to Italy to join the Resistance movement in northern Italy, where, from 1943 to 1945, he was a commander in the Garibaldi brigade. After the war, he continued to work as an organizer and journalist for the PCI, but a viewing of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946) inspired him to take up cinema as a tool for fostering political and social change. His first film experience was as third assistant and supporting actor in Aldo Vergano’s film on the Partisan movement, Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946). Having acquired his own camera in the early 1950s, he began making documentaries while continuing to work as assistant director to Yves Allégret and Mario Monicelli. In 1955, he initiated what would be a long and fruitful collaboration with Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas, and together they made “Giovanna,” the Italian segment of Die Windrose (Rose of the Winds, 1957), a five-episode international film exploring the position of women in postwar European society, coordinated by Dutch political filmmaker Joris Ivens. Continuing his partnership with Solinas, in 1957 Pontecorvo made his first feature, La grande strada azzura (The Wide Blue Road), a French–Italian–German coproduction that starred Yves Montand and Alida Valli in an adaptation of Solinas’s own novel, Squarciò. The story of a poor fisherman who refuses to join a cooperative but is eventually killed by his own unorthodox fishing methods, the film attempts to articulate serious sociopolitical themes but also often sinks into melodrama. In 1960, again in collaboration with Solinas, Pontecorvo made Kapò, an Italo–French–Yugoslav production that tells the story of a Jewish girl in the Treblinka death camp forced to become an accomplice of the German guards. A very effective portrayal of the moral dilemma engendered by desperate circumstances, the film is, however, marred, as both Pontecorvo and Solinas themselves later admitted, by the unnecessary inclusion of a love interest at the end. Then followed what is generally regarded as Pontecorvo’s greatest film and an undisputed masterwork of world cinema, La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966). Filmed on location with nonprofessional actors in a harsh black and white that has all the look of an actual newsreel, the film was a stunningly realistic and largely unbiased portrayal of the last

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stages of the Algerian liberation struggle against the French. It received immediate worldwide acclaim, being nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and Best Screenplay, winning the Golden Lion at Venice, and awarded the Nastro d’argento. In France, however, it was regarded as too controversial, and it was not screened publicly until 1971. Pontecorvo (and Solinas) continued to explore the anticolonial theme in Queimada (Burn!, 1969). Starring Marlon Brando as the treacherous mercenary and Sir William Walker, the film included a stirring soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. It was not until a decade later that Pontecorvo directed another feature, Ogro (Operation Ogre, 1979), a film set in Spain and dealing with the assassination of right-wing Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco by the Basque terrorist group ETA. Pontecorvo would later admit to regretting having made the film and, indeed, to having felt obliged to change the ending in the light of the abduction and death of Aldo Moro, which had taken place while the film was being made. Pontecorvo’s subsequent cinematic production consisted mostly of shorts and documentaries, among which his Ritorno ad Algeri (Return to Algiers, 1992), a documentary feature commissioned by RAI television that allowed him to revisit the country whose struggle for liberation he had documented so well almost 30 years earlier. It was, he concluded, a very changed country. Pontecorvo’s strongest contribution to Italian cinema in the following years was his active direction of the Venice Festival in the 1990s. In 2001, he joined a number of other Italian directors in filming the much-contested G8 meeting in Genoa and thus contributing to the communal film, Un altro mondo è possible (Another World Is Possible, 2001). PONTI, CARLO (1912–2007). Producer. A law graduate from the University of Milan, Ponti practiced as a lawyer before being drawn into the film industry in the early 1940s, his earliest productions being Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1941) and Alberto Lattuada’s Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1943). After World War II, he worked as an executive producer for Lux Film on more than a dozen films, among them Luigi Zampa’s Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947) and Lattuada’s Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948), before leaving in 1950 to join Dino De Laurentiis in setting up the Ponti–De Laurentiis company with which, for the next seven years, he produced a host of important films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51 (The Greatest Love, 1951), Mario Camerini’s Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), and Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954). After producing King Vidor’s monumental War and Peace (1956), the company was dissolved, and, due in part to legal problems relating to his Mexican marriage to Sophia Loren, Ponti moved to France, where he nevertheless produced some of Vittorio De Sica’s most important films of the 1960s,

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including La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), and Matrimonio all’Italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964). At the same time, he also lent support to the emerging French New Wave by producing, among others, Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est un femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961), Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961), and Claude Chabrol’s L’oeil du malin (The Third Lover, 1962). In 1965, he scored one of his greatest critical and box office successes with David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, for which he received the Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Among the most notable of his subsequent productions were Michelangelo Antonioni’s first three international films, Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and Professione reporter (The Passenger, 1975), and Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), which received both the César award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. More often remembered as merely the husband of Sophia Loren rather than as a major figure in the international film industry, Ponti produced more than 140 films in an illustrious career that spanned six decades, a contribution that was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Milan International Film Festival in 2000. PONZI, MAURIZIO (1939–). Film critic, director, and screenwriter. After working as a film critic and regular writer for journals such as Filmcritica and Cinema 60, Ponzi graduated to making documentaries for the Corona Cinematografica company in the mid-1960s before writing and directing his first feature, I visionari (The Visionaries, 1968), a film inspired by the writings of Robert Musil that was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. This was followed by Equinozio (Equinox, 1971), an adaptation of a futuristic novel by Anna Banti, and Il caso Raoul (The House of Raoul, 1975), based on a clinical case study from R. D. Laing’s Self and Others. Ponzi then worked for a number of years in television, where he directed, among other things, a version of Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century play Hedda Gabler and a documentary on Cinecittà. He returned to the big screen in the early 1980s with a series of light comedies featuring cabaret actor (and future director) Francesco Nuti: Madonna che silenzio c’e stasera (What a Ghostly Silence There Is Tonight, 1982), Io, Chiara e lo Scuro (The Pool Hustlers, 1982), and Son contento (I’m Happy, 1983). These were followed by the family melodrama Qualcosa di biondo (Aurora by Night, 1984), which marked Sophia Loren’s return to the screen after a significant absence; Il Volpone (The Big Fox, 1988), loosely based on Ben Jonson’s caustic 17th-century comedy; and Volevo i pantaloni (I Wanted Trousers, 1990), the adaptation of a best-selling novel by Lara Cardella that denounced the continuing oppression of women in southern Italian families. After the porn-movie spoof Vietato ai minori (Forbidden to Minors, 1992), and the

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more sociologically inspired Italiani (Italians, 1996), Ponzi directed A luci spente (With Lights Out, 2004), a film about the making of a film during the last years of World War II that fictionally re-creates the events surrounding Vittorio De Sica’s filming of La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven) in 1944. He subsequently worked for television, directing the six-part miniseries E poi c’è Filippo (And Then There’s Filippo, 2006) for Mediaset’s Channel 5, before returning to the big screen with his most recent Ci vediamo a casa (See You at Home, 2012), the story of three couples attempting to find a suitable house to live in. PROIETTI, GIGI (1940–). Actor, singer, musician, dancer, dubber, writer, and raconteur. One of Italy’s most-loved all-round entertainers who, in a career spanning 60 years has ranged across cabaret and traditional, experimental, and musical theater as well as radio, television, and cinema, Gigi (short for Luigi) Proietti enrolled for a degree in jurisprudence at Rome’s La Sapienza University but soon abandoned his law degree in favor of studying mime at the university’s center for theater studies. At the same time, having already taught himself the guitar, piano, piano-accordion, and double bass, he formed a small group that played at dancing venues along the Tiber and nightclubs in the city center. Having decided on an acting career, Proietti made his grand debut onstage in 1963 in the cabaret show Il can-can degli Italiani (Can-Can Italian Style), for which he had also composed the music. By 1964, he had joined the newly formed Gruppo Sperimentale 101, a company devoted to engaging with the works of more avant-garde playwrights such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, as well as experimenting with new ways of staging the classical repertoire. He received his first significant break in 1970 when, having moved to work with the Teatro Stabile dell’Aquila (Civic Theater of the City of Aquila), he was called at the last minute to substitute for singersongwriter Domenico Modugno in the musical Alleluja brava gente (Hallelujah, Good People, 1970). His greatest triumph onstage, however, would come in 1976 with A me gli occhi, please (Please Give Me Your Eyes), a free-wheeling and innovative one-man musical variety show created in collaboration with poet-writer Roberto Lerici, which, having been scheduled as a filler for four evenings, received such an overwhelming audience response that its run was extended to almost four years. In the meantime, Proietti had also begun to work in the cinema. After small parts in, among others, Alessandro Blasetti’s La ragazza del bersagliere (Soldier’s Girl, 1967), Damiano Damiani’s Una ragazza piuttosto complicata (A Complicated Girl, 1969), and Mario Monicelli’s Brancaleone alle crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970), he scored the male lead in Tinto Brass’s early film L’urlo (The Howl, 1970). There followed major roles in Marcello Ciorciolini’s Meo Patacca (1972); Luigi Magni’s La Tosca

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(1973), in which he played Mario Cavaradossi; and in Alberto Lattuada’s Le farò da padre (Bambina, 1974). After providing a fine performance as the weaker of the two sons in Mauro Bolognini’s L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance, 1976), he won something of a cult following playing the ebullient, if born-to-lose, racetrack punter Bruno Fioretti, more commonly known as Mandrake, in Steno’s Febbre da cavallo (Horse Fever, 1976), a muchloved role that he would reprise almost 30 years later in Carlo Vanzina’s Febbre da cavallo—la mandrakata (Horse Fever: The Mandrake Sting, 2002). Despite his theater commitments after the success of A me gli occhi, Proietti was still able to appear in Sergio Citti’s Casotto (Beach House, 1977) and Due pezzi di pane (Two Pieces of Bread, 1979) as well as, internationally, in minor roles in Ted Kotcheff’s Who Is Killing All the Chefs of Europe (1978) and Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978). In the wake of his assumption of the role of artistic director of the prestigious Teatro Brancaccio of Rome in 1978, the 1980s had him retreat somewhat from films in order to focus more on the stage and television. The year 1981 saw him playing the title role in Fregoli (1981), the four-part TV series paying homage to the Italian silent-era pioneer and quick-change artist, and two years later taking the lead role in Caro Petrolini (Dear Petrolini, 1983), a telefilm similarly paying tribute to a great actor of the interwar years whose theater and style of performance in many ways anticipated Proietti’s own. By the mid-1980s, Proietti had also added opera and lyric theater to his bow, directing innovative productions of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca (1984), Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (Spoleto 85), Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff (1986), and Wolfgang Mozart’s Le nozzi di Figaro (1987). In 1990, he also made a brief foray into directing television with Villa Arzilla, a anodyne sitcom for the RAI set in an old people’s home, but thereafter returned in front of the camera to play the lead in Italian Restaurant, an RAI eight-part miniseries set in New York. However, his most successful role on television and the one for which he will probably be best remembered was the title character in Il Maresciallo Rocca (Sergeant Rocca), a long-running series of 28 episodes stretching over five seasons between 1996 and 2005. Proietti was so popular as the genial sergeant of the Carabinieri engaged in solving criminal cases while also dealing with the domestic problems of a widower with three grown children that he was brought back for a sixth two-part series in 2008. In the last decade, while continuing to appear in his one-man stage shows and, as artistic director, also manage the Rome Globe Theater, he has returned sporadically to the big screen in a number of holiday films and light comedies, appearing in Carlo Vanzina’s Un’estate al mare (A Summer at the Seaside, 2008) and Un’estate ai Caraibi (A Summer in the Caribbean, 2009) as well as in Fausto Brizzi’s cinepanettone Indovina chi viene a Natale (Guess Who’s Coming at Christmas, 2013). Most recently he has appeared in

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a slightly more serious guise playing an elderly writer driving to Stockholm with his two wayward adult children and his personal assistant in order to receive his Nobel Prize in Alessandro Gassman’s Il premio (The Prize, 2017). Perhaps more than any other actor of his generation, Proietti has also been active as a dubber. Beginning in 1964 with Warner Bros’ cartoon character Sylvester the Cat, he has been the Italian voice of, among others, Helmut Berger, Michel Piccoli, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Donald Sutherland, Richard Burton, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro. Proietti’s dubbing of Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) earned him a Nastro d’argento in 1997. In 2018, he was also awarded the David di Donatello for Career Achievement. Proietti now has his own website at https://gigiproietti.it. PUCCINI, GIANNI (1914–1968). Critic, screenwriter, and director. A film critic who contributed frequently to specialized journals such as Bianco e nero and Cinema, Puccini distinguished himself in his collaboration on the screenplay of Luchino Visconti’s landmark Ossessione (1943). After the war, he worked closely with Giuseppe De Santis, helping to write the screenplays of all of De Santis’s early films as well as serving as assistant director on Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950). In the late 1950s, Puccini codirected two witty comedies, Parole di ladro (Honor among Thieves, 1957) and Il marito (The Husband, 1958) with Nanni Loy, before directing his first major solo feature, L’impiegato (The Office Worker, 1960), another clever comedy with which he also helped to launch the film career of Nino Manfredi. Of the dozen subsequent films that Puccini directed or codirected before his untimely death, the best remembered is undoubtedly I sette fratelli Cervi (The Seven Cervi Brothers, 1968), a recounting of the last days of a family of seven brothers who were all summarily executed by Fascists in December 1943 for taking part in the Resistance movement.

Q QUATRIGLIO, COSTANZA (1973–). Director and screenwriter. One of the leading members of a new generation of Italian female documentary filmmakers that has emerged in the new millennium, Quatriglio graduated in law in her native Palermo (Sicily) before studying film direction in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While at the Centro, she began making short- and medium-length documentaries, generally engaging with social issues; her Ècosiamale, an hour-long exploration of the harsh lives of adolescent girls living in the poorer quarters of her native Palermo, received the Special Mention Jury Prize at the Turin Festival in 2000. After graduating from the Centro and having completed several other documentaries, including L’insonnia di Devi—viaggio attraverso le adozioni internazionali (Devi’s Insomnia—Travels through International Adoptions, 2001), she made her debut fictional feature, L’isola (The Island, 2003). A delicate portrait of the lives and the coming of age of a young girl and her brother on the Sicilian island of Favignana, using nonprofessional actors and filmed in documentary style, the film was invited to screen at Cannes in La quinzaine des réalisateurs and, in Italy, was awarded the Nastro d’argento for Paolo Fresu’s evocative musical score. A half-hour documentary on the making of the film by Quatriglio herself, Racconti per l’isola (Stories for the Island, 2003), was also screened to a warm reception at the 60th Venice Festival. She thus returned to documentaries with Comandare—una storia Zen (To Lead—a Zen Story, 2004) and explored the possibilities of television with Raìz—radici a Capo Verde (Raìz—Roots in Cape Verde, 2004), a three-part miniseries on immigrants from Cape Verde made for the national broadcaster’s third channel, RAI 3. Two years later, the 90-minute Il mondo addosso (The World on One’s Shoulders, 2006), allowed four young refugees from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe to recount on the screen the ordeal they had endured in order to reach the relative safety of Italy. After Il mio cuore umano (My Human Heart, 2009), a one-hour portrait of popular Italian singer Nada Malanima, Quatriglio embarked on the difficult project of bringing to the screen Terra matta, the engrossing 1,000-page diary of the semiliterate Sicilian writer Vincenzo Rabito, which in 2000 had 395

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won the prestigious Premio Pieve for unpublished memoirs. Through a complex process of blending newly filmed sequences with archival footage, shots of diary pages with personal photographs, and a visit back to Rabito’s native Chiaramonte by his three sons with a voice-over, Quatriglio managed to create a portrait of the 20th century analogous to the picture that emerges from Rabito’s text. Recognized as an extraordinary achievement, Terramatta (2012) won the Civitas Vitae Prossima award at Venice and the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary of the year. A year later, she returned to a civic engagement with specific issues in Con il fiato sospeso (Holding One’s Breath, 2013), the fictional re-creation of the wicked predicament of graduate biology students at a Sicilian university obliged, in the absence of prompt action on the part of the administration, to carry out their research in laboratories operating under potentially fatal conditions. The short film was screened at Venice that year and awarded the Gillo Pontecorvo–Arcobaleno Latino Prize. In a continual attempt to extend the possibilities of documentary, in Triangle (2014) the issue of deaths in the workplace is given greater human depth and resonance when the extended testimony of a female worker, the only survivor of the collapse of the building in Barletta in 2011 that killed all her fellow workers, is juxtaposed with a major fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York exactly a century earlier in which hundreds of mostly Italian female workers had also perished. The film earned Quatriglio her second Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary. A year later, in 87 ore—gli ultimi giorni di Francesco Mastrogiovanni (87 Hours—the Last Days of Francesco Mastrogiovanni, 2015), Quatriglio edited hundreds of hours of video footage from a handful of hospital closed-circuit cameras in order to create a coherent visual account of the inhumane treatment to which primary school teacher Francesco Mastrogiovanni had been subjected following a forced hospitalization, which, 87 hours later, had resulted in his death. Embracing fiction once again, she most recently directed her second major feature, Sembra mio figlio (Just Like My Son, 2018). Reconstructing a Hazara man’s voyage back to Afghanistan in order to be recognized by a mother who hasn’t seen him since he fled the country at the age of five, it was the first Italian film to be shot in Iran for five decades. In 2019, Quatriglio was appointed head of the Palermo branch of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. QUESTI, GIULIO (1924–2014). Writer, screenwriter, and director. One of the most iconoclastic and independently minded figures of the Italian cinema in the postwar period, Questi grew up in a fiercely antifascist family and so inevitably joined the Resistance movement and actively fought as a partisan in the final years of the Second World War. In the immediate postwar period, after completing university studies, he began editing a cultural journal and

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making short documentaries. In 1950, he moved from his native Bergamo to Rome, where he soon became part of the revival of the film industry that was animating the capital at the time. While continuing to make a number of his own documentaries on a shoestring budget, he also worked as assistant director and factotum for other more established filmmakers such as Valerio Zurlini, Alberto Lattuada, and Francesco Rosi. After receiving a Nastro d’argento for his short educational documentary Giocare (Games, 1957), a chance meeting with Federico Fellini led to his playing the role of the Roman nobleman Don Giulio in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). He contributed a much-praised segment to Cesare Zavattini’s portmanteau film Le italiane e l’amore (Latin Lovers, 1961), but his talents really came to the fore in “Il passo,” the impressive 35-minute episode he directed for the anthology film Amori Pericolosi (Dangerous Loves, 1964). It was in the postproduction of “Il passo” that Questi struck up a close friendship with the up-and-coming film editor Kim Arcalli, with whom, in the closest collaboration, he would make the three remarkable feature films for which Questi is likely to be best remembered: Se sei vivo spara (Django Kill . . . If You Live Shoot!, 1967), La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg, 1968), and Arcana (1972). Although all three were clearly forays into the reigning genres of the time—the Spaghetti Western, the giallo, and the mystery-supernatural genre—all three also patently pushed their genre formulas beyond their limit and into the realm of art cinema. Unfortunately, especially after the premature death of Arcalli in 1978, none of Questi’s subsequent projects would achieve similar heights. Having from his earliest years in the industry made ends meet by producing short films for the national broadcaster’s popular advertising program Carosello, from the beginning of the 1980s he worked mostly for television, directing music documentaries (A proposito di Lucio Battisti, 1980); two effective adaptations of mystery stories by E. T. A. Hoffman, L’uomo della sabbia (The Man of Sand, 1981) and Vampirismus (1982); and, teaming up with fellow screenwriter-director David Grieco, the five-episode miniseries Quando arriva il giudice (When the Judge Arrives, 1984). In the 1990s, again together with Grieco, he wrote and directed the television noir-thriller Non aprite all’uomo nero (Don’t Open the Door to the Dark Man) and five 90-minute episodes of the second series of the popular police miniseries L’ispettore Sarti (Police Inspector Sarti, 1994). In the new millennium, now well into his 80s but ever adventurous, he embraced the digital camera and, living alone in his Roman apartment, wrote, photographed, and acted in a host of surreal short films that were only released on DVD (By Giulio Questi, Ripley’s Home Video, 2007). In 2009, Lola, another short film, self-produced under the aegis of Solipso Films, was screened at the Venice Festival.

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Questi subsequently concentrated mainly on writing, publishing Uomini e comandanti (Men and Commanders, 2014), a book of short stories recounting his partisan experiences, as well as a remarkably lucid and illuminating autobiography titled, with his usual propensity for whimsical understatement, Se ricordo bene (If I Remember Well, 2014). Following his death at the age of 90, the city of Bergamo instituted an annual prize for short digital film production in his name and memory.

R RALLI, GIOVANNA (1935–). Actress. Ralli made a first appearance on the big screen as an uncredited child extra in Vittorio De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1942). After the war and still only a teenager, she took the first real steps in a career that would see her become, for a period, one of the pinup starlets of the Italian cinema by acting the compliant daughter in Aldo Fabrizi’s two “Passaguai Family” films, La Famiglia Passaguai (1951) and La famiglia Passaguai fa fortuna (The Passaguai Family Makes Its Fortune, 1952), and their virtual sequel, Papà diventa mamma (Dad becomes Mom, 1952). Her personality emerged more distincly playing one of the young telephonists in Gianni Franciolini's Le signorine del 04 (The Young Ladies of the 04, 1955) and even more definitively as Mafalda, the most assertive of the five young women in Valerio Zurlini’s Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano, 1955). She subsequently evolved a more mature characterization, playing opposite Marcello Mastroianni in Luciano Emmer’s Il momento più bello (The Most Wonderful Moment, 1957) before taking on a small part in Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959), and then the much more significant role of the heroic Esperia, sheltering the Allied POWs in Rossellini’s Era notte a Rome (Escape by Night, 1960). Having by now accrued a solid reputation, she sang and danced through the title role of Carmine Gallone’s Carmen di Trastevere (Carmen 63, 1962) and played the feisty left-wing journalist, Anna, in Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life, 1964), before shouldering perhaps the most psychologically complex role of her career as Piera, the conflicted and unhappy wife in Paolo Spinosa’s La fuga (The Escape, 1965), a powerful performance with lesbian undertones that saw her awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best Actress. Having already ventured outside Italy by appearing in André Versini’s French criminal saga, Horace 62 (The Fabiani Affair, 1962), a chance meeting with American director, Blake Edwards, drew her to Hollywood to act in Edwards’ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966). This was followed by the lead role in the heist film, The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967) and a 399

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similar role in the UK production, Deadfall (1968), in which she starred with Michael Caine. Nevertheless, she found Hollywood uncongenial and so returned to Italy where her impressive performance in Italo Zingarelli’s Una prostituta al servizio del pubblico ed in regola con le leggi dello Stato (A Prostitute Serving the Public and in Compliance with the Laws of the State, 1971), earned her another nomination for the Nastro d’argento. Moving further to the wild side, she soon starred in Enzo G. Castellari’s crime thriller, Gli occhi freddi della paura (Cold Eyes of Fear, 1971) before playing Assistant Police Commissioner Stori in Massimo Dallamano’s hard-hitting poliziesco, La polizia chiede aiuto (What Have They Done to Your Daughters? , 1974). In the same year, her performance as Elide Catenacci in Ettore Scola‘s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974), netted her the Silver Ribbon for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. From this relative high point, her career appeared to decline. After appearances in several light sex comedies and a feature in Playboy magazine, she played opposite Tomas Milian in Pasquale Festa Campanile’s uninspired comedy, Manolesta (1981), before withdrawing from the cinema altogether for the next decade, preferring to work in the theatre, where, in 1982, she starred in a stage version of Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), directed by Ettore Scola. She made a return to the silver screen in 1991, when her compelling performance as Pina in Francesca Archibugi’s Verso sera (Towards Evening, 1991) brought her another Silver Ribbon nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In spite of this, she subsequently chose to appear mostly on the small screen, in telemovies and in popular extended television series such as Un prete tra noi (A Priest among Us, 1997; 1999) and Angelo il custode (2001). After having made only sporadic forays back to cinema, in the small parts she played in Michele Soavi’s Il sangue dei vinti (Blood of the Losers, 2008), and Paolo Genovese’s Immaturi - il viaggio (Immature, 2012), her performance as the mother in Pupi Avati’s Il ragazzo d’oro (A Golden Boy, 2014) saw her once again nominated for the Silver Ribbon for an Actress in a Supporting role. In the same year, she received the Anna Magnani prize and, a year later, a Special David for her whole career. In her acceptance speech, she declared she was henceforth definitively retiring from the cinema. RANIERI, MASSIMO (1951–). Singer, stage and screen actor, stage director, television presenter, and dubber. One of Italy’s most popular entertainers, Ranieri (born Giovanni Calone) began what would be a stellar career spanning almost seven decades as a young boy singing for his supper in restaurants and at weddings in his native Naples. Soon noticed for his strong voice and his natural flair as a performer, at the age of 13 he was given the opportunity to record his first EP under the name of Gianni Rock, touring it as far as New York. In 1966, he made an impressive debut on Italian national

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television in the musical variety show Scala reale, singing “L’amore è una cosa meravigliosa” (“Love Is a Marvelous Thing”). Two years later, his first appearance under the stage name that he would use from then on at the Sanremo Festival established his reputation as one of the most promising upand-coming stars of Italian popular music. At the same time, a parallel career on the big screen opened up for him in 1970 when Mauro Bolognini chose him to play the young working-class protagonist of Metello (1970), in a powerful performance that brought him both a David di Donatello and an Italian Golden Globe as Best Emerging Actor. In the following years, as his singing and recording career flourished—and by the mid-1970s having also embraced the stage and regularly working with prestigious directors such as Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Giorgio Strehler—he appeared in more than 50 films, ranging from the international Jules Verne adventure The Light at the Edge of the World (1971), where he played alongside Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner, to Nino Russo’s melancholic homage to Naples, Fondali notturni (Backdrops of Night, 2000). Much of his screen work from the 1980s onward was done for television, both in free-standing telemovies such as Gianfranco Mingozzi’s La vela incantata (The Magic Screen, 1982) and in multiyear miniseries such as Sergio Sollima’s I ragazzi di celuloide (The Celluloid Boys, season 1, 1981; season 2, 1984). In 1996, he also voiced the character of Quasimodo in the Italian version of Walt Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Undoubtedly, his most accomplished work on the big screen in the new millennium was very convincingly playing the role of Pier Paolo Pasolini in David Grieco’s La macchinazione (The Ploy, 2016). In 2007, Ranieri, still at the apex of his popularity, published his autobiography, Mia madre non voleva: Autobiografia di Giovanni Calone, che sarei io (My Mother Was against It: Autobiography of Giovanni Calone, Meaning Me). He currently also hosts his own webpage at http:// www.massimoranieri.it. RESISTANCE. Movement. The political and military resistance to Fascism and to the Nazi occupying forces that took place in Italy after September 1943 understandably featured prominently in many of the films of the immediate postwar period, beginning with the two films that remained the classic model for representations of the Resistance, Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946). The Resistance, presented as a heroic struggle between good and evil, was also naturally the focus of a number of films produced by the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (National Partisan Association), among them Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory, 1945), a quasi-documentary using largely stock footage and produced collaboratively by Mario Serandrei, Giuseppe De Santis, Luchino Visconti, and others; Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry,

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1946); Giulio Ferroni’s Pian delle Stelle (1946); and Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947). The Resistance, seen as a moral imperative, was also at the center of Mario Camerini’s Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945), Alessandro Blasetti’s Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946), Carmine Gallone’s Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, 1946), and Giacomo Gentilomo’s O sole mio (My Sun, 1946). However, in the wake of the official hostility shown by the center-right authorities toward films such as Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Achtung! Bandits!, 1951), which attempted to present the Resistance as an aspect of a more generalized class struggle in Italy, the theme of the Resistance largely disappeared from Italian screens for almost a decade. It returned in force at the end of the 1950s in Rossellini’s Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) and Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night, 1960) and continued to appear insistently in the following years in a host of films, among them Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), Nanni Loy’s Le quattro giornate di Napoli (The Four Days of Naples, 1962), Gianfranco De Bosio’s Il terrorista (The Terrorist, 1963), Luigi Comencini’s La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl, 1963), and Gianni Puccini’s I sette fratelli Cervi (The Seven Cervi Brothers, 1968). At the beginning of the 1970s, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970) utilized the Resistance as the stage for a psychoanalytical search for the father, whereas two years later Marco Leto’s La villeggiatura (Black Holiday, 1972) sought to analyze it historically as a struggle against a much more deeply rooted authoritarianism in the Italian political psyche. The Resistance continued to feature prominently in many films made during the 1970s, among them Ettore Scola’s C’eraramo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974), Francesco Maselli’s Il sospetto (The Suspect, 1974), and Valentino Orsini’s Uomini e no (Men or Not Men, 1980), which adapted the classic Neorealist Resistance novel by Elio Vittorini. Mauro Bolognini’s Libera, amore mio (Libera, My Love, 1975) and Giuliano Montaldo’s L’Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die, 1976) were two of a very small number of films that attempted to portray women’s participation in the movement. At the beginning of the 1980s, before fading from sight again for a number of years, the Resistance was given its most poetic and mythical inflection in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982). After being absent from Italian screens for another decade, the Resistance returned in passing in one episode of the Tavianis’ generational chronicle Fiorile (Wild Flower, 1993). By this time, however, there had also developed a historically revisionist reading of the Resistance itself, and the darker side of the movement and its aftermath became the focus for Guido Chiesa’s Il caso Martello (The Martello Case, 1992) and Massimo Gugliemi’s Gang-

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sters (1992). Five years later, Renzo Martinelli’s Porzus (1997) portrayed one of the most disturbing episodes of the entire Resistance movement when, in February 1945, a large group of Communist partisans massacred 22 members of the rival Catholic-inspired Osoppo Brigade outside a small village in northern Italy, close to the Yugoslav border. Although the film was said to be based on firm historical evidence, its depiction of the Resistance was highly controversial and fiercely contested. The more traditional interpretation of the Resistance as the heroic struggle for freedom from tyranny returned in Daniele Luchetti’s I piccoli maestri (Little Teachers, 1998), which recounts the story of a number of idealistic university students who follow their professor into the hills in order to fight for a just cause. A heroic view of the Resistance also grounds Guido Chiesa’s adaptation of Beppe Fenoglio’s classic Resistance novel Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, 2000) and its portrayal in Giorgio Diritti’s heartrending L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come, 2009). The most recent revistation of the Resistance movement has been in Vittorio Taviani’s adaptation of Fenoglio’s posthumous novel, Una questione privata (Rainbow: A Private Affair, 2017). RIGHELLI, GENNARO (1886–1949). Actor, director, and screenwriter. After some experience acting on the Neapolitan stage, in 1909 Righelli joined the Cines studios as a scriptwriter and by 1911 had graduated to directing. Soon thereafter he moved to Naples, where for the next decade he directed some 30 films, mostly for the Vesuvio Film Company, many of which featured his wife, the diva Maria Jacobini. Best remembered from this period are L’innamorata (Payment in Full, 1920), the story of a dark and brooding vamp that was censored for what was regarded as its excessive sensuality, and Cainà, l’isola e il continente (Cainà: The Island and the Mainland, 1921), a film shot on location in Sardinia. In the wake of the crisis in the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, Righelli and Jacobini moved to Germany, where he directed some 15 features, including an adaptation of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, under the title of Der geheime Kurier (The Secret Courier, 1928), and Der Bastard (The Bastard, 1925), a weepy but impressive melodrama in which an unwed mother relentlessly pursues the father of her child literally around the globe. In 1929, Righelli returned to Italy to direct La canzone dell’amore (The Song of Love, 1930), the first Italian sound film to emerge from the newly restored Cines studios. Another heartstring-tugging melodrama, loosely based on a short story by Luigi Pirandello (ironically titled In silenzio), the film was shot simultaneously in several different languages. The Italian version achieved an immediate if short-lived popularity, not least for the catchy song “Solo per te Lucia” (“Only for You, Lucia”), specially composed for the film by Cesare Andrea Bixio.

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Among Righelli’s many subsequent sound films were Italy’s first aviation feature, L’armata azzurra (The Blue Fleet, 1932), and a number of comedies that employed the talents of famed Sicilian stage actor Angelo Musco, the best of these being Pensaci Giacomino (Think It Over, Jack, 1936), adapted from a play by the same name by Pirandello. Righelli’s prolific productivity declined dramatically after the war. Abbasso la miseria (Down with Misery, 1945) was followed by Abbasso la ricchezza (Peddlin’ in Society, 1946), both starring Anna Magnani in fairly lightweight comic roles. His last film, Il corriere del re (The King’s Courier, 1947), was another adaptation of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. RISI, DINO (1916–2008). Screenwriter and director. One of the foremost directors of that biting social satire that came to be known as commedia all’italiana, Risi (brother of poet and director Nelo Risi and father of Marco Risi) originally trained as a doctor and specialized in psychiatry but soon abandoned medicine in order to work in the cinema. He served his first apprenticeship as assistant to Mario Soldati on Piccolo mondo antico (OldFashioned World, 1941) and to Alberto Lattuada on Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1943). After spending the final years of World War II in Switzerland, where he was able to study with veteran French director Jacques Feyder, Risi returned to Italy in the immediate postwar period to work as a film critic and documentary filmmaker. Then, after having also honed his screenwriting skills by collaborating on the scripts of Lattuada’s Anna (1951) and Mario Camerini’s Gli eroi della domenica (Sunday Heroes, 1952), he directed his first fictional feature, Vacanze col gangster (Vacation with a Gangster, 1952). There followed a number of other light comedies and an episode made for the anthology film L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953) before he scored his first big commercial success with Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955), the third in the series of what had been the hugely popular Bread and Love films directed by Luigi Comencini. Two years later, he achieved even greater box office success with Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1957), a lively and lighthearted romp through the lives and complicated loves of a group of young people in Rome, which was immediately followed by its similarly successful sequel, Belle ma povere (Pretty but Poor, 1957), both the highest-grossing films in Italy in their respective years. Then, beginning with Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959) and continuing through the next decade with Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), I mostri (literally, The Monsters, 1963, but known in the United States as 15 from Rome), Il gaucho (The Gaucho, 1964), Il tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat, 1967), and Il profeta (The Prophet, 1968)—always working with the same team of screenwriters and utilizing a regular group of comic actors (Alberto Sordi, Ugo Tognazzi, Nino Manfre-

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di, and Vittorio Gassman)—Risi produced a long line of mordant social comedies that bitingly satirized, frequently to the point of caricature, the changing mores of Italian society as it raced ruthlessly toward affluence on the back of the so-called economic miracle. Underscoring the seriousness of the moral intent beneath the caricature, Risi’s comedies often included tragic deaths, as in Il vedovo where, in an attempt to eliminate his rich wife, the financially strapped businessman played by Alberto Sordi actually engineers his own death, or, even more memorably, the abrupt and unexpected death of the young co-protagonist in the car accident at the close of Il sorpasso. However, despite their extraordinary popularity, Risi’s caustic comedies of manners continued to be severely undervalued by critics, who judged them as mere exercises in commercial cinema, at least until the mid-1970s when Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974) achieved international recognition, receiving two Oscar nominations in the United States and the César award for Best Foreign Film in France and, at home, two David di Donatello awards and the Nastro d’argento. By this time, Risi had begun to extend both the range and depth of his comic vision to include an exploration of issues such as the celibacy of priests in La moglie del prete (The Priest’s Wife, 1970), judicial privileges and the law in In nome del popolo italiano (In the Name of the Italian People, 1971), and political terrorism and the media in Mordi e fuggi (Dirty Weekend, 1973). Indeed, as the 1970s wore on, while not foregoing satirical comedy, Risi moved into more dramatic territory with an effective reworking of a familiar horror motif in Anima persa (Lost Soul, 1977) and an elegant playing out of the classic murder mystery formula in La stanza del vescovo (The Bishop’s Bedroom, 1977). Nevertheless, after a valiant—and largely successful—attempt to reprise some of the fierce social satire of the original Mostri in I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, 1977), directed collaboratively with Ettore Scola and Mario Monicelli, and another interesting engagement with the theme of political terrorism in Caro papà (Dear Father, 1979), Risi’s formerly prolific production fell away to a trickle during the 1980s and, with the possible exception of the moving portrait of old age and mental illness in Tolgo il disturbo (I’ll Be Going Now, 1990), never quite regained its former brilliance. Nevertheless, in 1993 Risi was honored at the Cannes Film Festival with a retrospective of 15 of his most significant films, and at the Venice Festival in 2002, he was presented with the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. In 2004, in recognition of his services to Italian culture, he was also made a Knight of the Great Cross. RISI, MARCO (1951–). Director, producer, and screenwriter. Son of veteran director Dino Risi, Marco began his apprenticeship in the cinema as an assistant to his uncle, Nelo Risi, on Una stagione all’inferno (A Season in

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Hell, 1971). After further experience as second unit director on Duccio Tessari’s Zorro (1975) and La madama (Cops, 1976), Risi directed Appunti su Hollywood (Notes on Hollywood, 1978), a four-episode television documentary on American cinema. He subsequently cowrote the screenplays for Caro papà (Dear Father, 1979) and Sono fotogenico (I’m Photogenic, 1980), both directed by his father, before making his own feature directorial debut with Vado a vivere da solo (I’m Going to Live by Myself, 1982). After making several other only moderately successful light comedies, he embarked on a series of more socially committed films, beginning with Soldati, 365 giorni all’alba (Soldiers, 1987). Two years later, Mery per sempre (Forever Mary, 1989), set in a Sicilian reform school for young offenders, won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and its sequel, Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside, 1990), earned Risi the David di Donatello for Best Direction in 1991. In the same year, his Muro di gomma (The Invisible Wall, 1991), an investigation of the never-resolved mystery of the Ustica air disaster in 1980, was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. In 1992, together with Maurizio Tedesco, Risi founded the production company Sorpasso Film, with which he financed not only his own films but also the debut films of a number of other emerging young directors, among which Ferzan Ozpetek’s Hamam, il bagno turco (Steam: The Turkish Baths, 1997), for which he shared the Nastro d’argento as Best Producer. Among his own subsequent films were Il branco (The Pack, 1994), a disturbing film about gang rape; L’ultimo capodanno (Humanity’s Last New Year’s Eve, 1998), a grotesque social farce mixing elements of the commedia all’italiana with American pulp fiction; and Tre mogli (Three Wives, 2001), a female road movie through South America. In the new millennium, after a celebratory but not uncritical biopic of the legendary soccer player in Maradona, la mano di Dio (Maradona, the Hand of God, 2007), he directed L’ ultimo padrino (The Last Godfather, 2008), a two-part television series on the notorious Mafia boss Bernardo Povenzano. The Mafia theme continued in his next feature for the big screen, Fortapàsc (Fort Apache Napoli, 2009), a film focused on the last months in the life of the young investigative journalist Giancarlo Siano before being gunned down in 1985 by Mafia hit men. Cha cha cha (2013), despite its title, was a taut crime thriller, which came before a surprising turn to madcap comedy in Risi’s most recent Natale a 5 stelle (5 Star Christmas, 2018). RISI, NELO (1920–2015). Poet, screenwriter, and director. Brother of director Dino Risi and cinematographer Fernando Risi, Nelo Risi trained as a doctor but never practiced medicine, preferring instead both literature—he came to be widely regarded as one of the leading poets in postwar Italy— and, like his brothers, the cinema.

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After some particularly harrowing experiences during World War II, and while beginning to publish his first collections of poetry in the immediate postwar period, Risi assisted John Ferno and Richard Leacock to make a series of human-geography documentaries, filmed in several European countries and in the African Sahara. Returning to Italy in the mid-1950s, he embarked on his own series of short documentaries, among them the strongly antifascist Il delitto Matteotti (The Assassination of Matteotti, 1956) and I fratelli Rosselli (The Rosselli Brothers, 1960). In 1961, he directed one of the episodes of Cesare Zavattini’s compilation film Le italiane e l’amore (Latin Lovers), which was followed by La strada più lunga (The Longest Road, 1965), a television film adaptation of a Resistance novel by Davide Lajolo. His first full-length feature for the big screen was Andremo in citta (We’ll Go to the City, 1966), a moving Holocaust narrative set and filmed in Yugoslavia. This was soon followed by what many regard as Risi’s finest film, Diario di una schizofrenica (Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl, 1968), which was screened at the Venice Festival to wide acclaim. While consolidating his reputation as one of Italy’s finest poets, Risi continued to make a number of well-received feature films, including Ondata di calore (Dead of Summer, 1970); Una stagione all’inferno (A Season in Hell, 1971), a fictional biography of the extraordinary French poet Arthur Rimbaud; and La colonna infame (The Infamous Column, 1973), an adaptation of the well-known historical chronicle by Alessandro Manzoni. In the following years, Risi tended to concentrate on his poetry, but he also continued to make a number of fine documentaries for television, among which was Venezia tra oriente o occidente (Venice between East and West, 1987). A decade later, he returned to directing for the big screen with Un amore di donna (Love of a Woman, 1988), which, however, was generally panned for its sentimentality. His reputation as a filmmaker was slightly restored by the last film he made for television, the Mafia melodrama Per odio, per amore (Deadly Temptation, 1991). RISORGIMENTO. Italy’s revolutionary movement for national unification, generally known as the Risorgimento, was one of Italian cinema’s favorite themes from its very inception. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Italian cinema was, quite literally, born under the sign of the Risorgimento, for what is historically regarded as the first Italian (short) feature film, Filoteo Alberini’s La presa di Roma (The Capture of Rome, 1905), was nothing less than a grand, celebratory re-creation of the culminating event of the struggle for Italian independence and unity, which was the breaching of the Roman walls at Porta Pia by the armies of the House of Savoy and the subsequent annexation of papal Rome as the capital of a united Italy. Made with the material support of the Italian army, which supplied the men and the

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armaments, the film was first screened outdoors on a giant screen at the very place where the battle had taken place exactly 35 years earlier, its last and crowning tableau vivant explicitly characterizing the event as an apotheosis. In the years that followed Alberini’s foundational film, Italian silent cinema returned often to the Risorgimento, especially as exemplified in the figure of one of its most legendary protoganists, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Only two years after La presa di Roma, Mario Caserini directed Garibaldi (1907), a brief portrait of the Risorgimento hero, for the Roman Cines company. He soon followed this with Anita Garibaldi (1910), a similarly heroic portrait of Garibaldi’s Brazilian wife and fellow freedom fighter. A year later, having moved to Turin to work for Ambrosio Film, Caserini produced the even grander I Mille (The Thousand, 1911), one of the first Italian full-length features (40 minutes), which utilized hundreds of extras to re-create the exploits of Garibaldi’s revolutionary Redshirts. Luigi Maggi’s Nozze d’oro (Golden Wedding Anniversary, 1911), similarly produced at the Ambrosio Film studios and winner of the first prize for a feature film awarded at the International Exhibition of Turin, also narrated the noble battles of the Risorgimento but this time in flashback, as the memories of an old bersagliere (light infantryman) recounted on his golden wedding anniversary. Maggi used this narrative stratagem again in a subsequent film he directed for Ambrosio, La lampada della nonna (The Grandmother’s Lamp, 1913), where the birthday gift of an electric lamp prompts a grandmother to recount how things had been during her youth, when she had fallen in love with a young infantryman involved in the Risorgimento struggles. With the beginning of World War I, what had been a national celebration of the Risorgimento now became nationalistic as a united Italy lined up against the old enemy, Austria. Consequently, a number of films made during this period, such as Augusto Jandolo’s Silvio Pellico (1915) and Brescia, leonessa d’Italia (Brescia, the Lioness of Italy, 1915), sought to celebrate the bravery and courage of the specifically anti-Austrian struggles of patriots like Silvio Pellico and Tito Speri. In the early years of the Fascist period, in addition to the continuing presence of a romantic fascination with the more heroic aspects of the movement, emblematized, as always, by Garibaldi and his redshirted volunteers, there was also an effort to suggest a historical continuity between the Risorgimento and Fascism in films such as Mario Volpe’s Il grido dell’aquila (The Cry of the Eagle, 1923), Umberto Paradisi’s Un balilla del ’48 (A Young Freedom Fighter in 1848, 1927), and Domenico Gaida’s I martiri d’Italia (The Martyrs of Italy, 1927). A mixture of personal obsession and a pedagogical mission appears to have motivated Silvio Laurenti Rosa’s series of films on the Risorgimento: Dalle cinque giornate di Milano alla breccia di Porta Pia (From the Five Days of Milan to the Breaching of Porta Pia, 1925), Garibaldi e i suoi tempi (Garibaldi and His Times, 1926), and another

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I martiri d’Italia (The Martyrs of Italy, 1928). Although, by all accounts, rather poor films, they attest to the continuing fascination with the movement during this period. Carmine Gallone’s La cavalcata ardente (The Fiery Cavalcade, 1925), one of the most interesting films of what was a low period in Italian cinema, was, for all its nationalistic fervor, largely a historical romance that used the Risorgimento merely as backdrop. However, in 1860 (Gesuzza, Garibaldian Wife, 1933), Alessandro Blasetti succeeded in creating a nationally popular historical epic that fused the private and the public, the personal and the political, in the moving story of a Sicilian shepherd who travels the length of Italy in order to join Garibaldi’s forces and return with them to liberate his family, his village, and Sicily itself from Bourbon tyranny. While 1860 is generally regarded as one of the best films ever produced on the Risorgimento, and as something of a forerunner of Neorealism in its realistic portrayal of the events, on-location shooting, and use of nonprofessional actors, it is significant that in its original ending, promptly excised after the war, Blasetti explicitly reiterated the notion of a continuity between the Redshirts and the Blackshirts, between the nationalistic ideals of the Risorgimento and the ideology of Fascism. The Risorgimento is again both the setting and theme of Enrico Guazzoni’s Il dottor Antonio (Doctor Antonio, 1937), the adaptation of a novel written in 1855 by revolutionary patriot Giovanni Ruffini (and already adapted several times during the silent period). Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1941) returns to using the Risorgimento struggles largely as backdrop for a family melodrama while Vittorio De Sica’s Un garibaldino al convento (A Garibaldian in the Convent, 1942) again utilizes the narrative stratagem of an extended flashback to look back nostalgically on the Risorgimento as a romantic period filled with youthful hopes and idealistic dreams that, in the event, remained unrealized. A fascination with the Risorgimento continued to underlie quite a number of films made in the immediate postwar period. The Risorgimento returned as backdrop in films such as Duilio Coletti’s Cuore (Heart, 1947), an adaptation of Edmondo De Amicis’s classic 19th-century educational novel, and Guido Brignone’s La sepolta viva (Buried Alive, 1948). In 1949, to celebrate the centenary of one of the major episodes of the Risorgimento, the foundation of the ill-fated Roman Republic, Mario Costa directed Cavalcata d’eroi (Cavalcade of Heroes, released 1950). In 1952, Goffredo Alessandrini’s Camicie rosse (Red Shirts, but also known as Anita Garibaldi) again sought to celebrate the heroism of both Garibaldi, played by Raf Vallone, and his wife, Anita, played with a great deal of fire and passion by Anna Magnani. In the same year, however, Pietro Germi’s Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (The Bandit of Tacca Del Lupo, 1952) presented a decidedly less flattering view of the northern army as it attempted to reimpose law and order in the south during the period of unification. A year later, Luchino

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Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954) set its story of love and betrayal within the historical context of one of the greatest Italian defeats of the Risorgimento, the routing of the forces of the House of Savoy by the Austrians at the Battle of Custoza. To celebrate the centenary of Italy’s official unification, Roberto Rossellini made Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi, 1961), a film that, despite Rossellini’s Neorealist heritage, ends up proposing, once again, a relatively hagiographic interpretation of the Risorgimento. Almost as a rejoinder, Visconti returned to the movement with Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), a sumptuous, faithful adaptation of the elegiac novel by Giuseppe Tommaso Di Lampedusa that suggested that, for all the bluster, the Risorgimento would end up providing less a panacea for Italy’s social and economic inequalities and more a continuation of its old ills. This more ambivalent attitude to the Risorgimento surfaces again strongly in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfan (1974), and the ostensibly liberating northern forces appear in an even more negative light in Florestano Vancini’s Bronte, cronaca di un massacro che i libri di scuola non hanno raccontato (Liberty, 1972, but more literally “Bronte, Chronicle of a Massacre that the History Books Have Failed to Recount”). Surprisingly, one year later, one of the most famous episodes in the entire Risorgimento, the five-day revolt against the Austrians in Milan in 1948, was chosen by Dario Argento for his brief and only foray into comedy, Le cinque giornate (The Five Days, 1973). Subsequently, the more traditional heroic interpretation of the Risorgimento was again put forward in Luigi Magni’s In nome del papa re (In the Name of the Pope King, 1977), which recounts the story of two of the last patriots to be executed for the cause of unification at the hands of the papal authorities in 1868, and repeated in Magni’s subsequent films Arrivano i bersaglieri (Here Comes the Infantry, 1980), ‘O re (The King of Naples, 1989), In nome del popolo sovrano (In the Name of the Sovereign People, 1990), and La carbonara (The Coal Woman, 2000). The theme appeared to fall out of favor in the new millennium, although Carlo Lizzani returned to it in 2004 in the RAI TV miniseries Le cinque giornate di Milano (The Five Days of Milan). More recently, Mario Martone made a grand return to the Risorgimento with his Noi credevamo (We Believed, 2011), a lavish and engaging production that was favorably compared with Visconti’s The Leopard, winning the David di Donatello in seven categories as well as being nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice. RIZZOLI, ANGELO (1889–1970). One of Italy’s most successful publishers from the early part of the 20th century, Rizzoli moved into film in the mid-1930s, founding the Novella Film company, with which he produced Max Ophüls’s La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman, 1934) and Vittorio De Sica’s directorial debut, Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940).

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In the immediate postwar period, Rizzoli was involved extensively in both commercial and art house cinema and generously supported several Neorealist films that lost money at the box office, including De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952) and Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950). He was rewarded, however, by the overwhelming commercial and critical success of two of Federico Fellini’s key films, La dolce vita (1960) and Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). ROHRWACHER, ALBA (1979–). Actress. Born in Umbria where her German father and Italian mother had relocated in order to practice beekeeping, Rohrwacher had nurtured early hopes of becoming a circus acrobat. She nevertheless enrolled in medicine at the University of Florence but, at the same time, began taking acting courses at the Florentine Accademia dei Piccoli and attending workshops with Emma Dante’s physical theater troupe. Foregoing her medical degree, she subsequently moved to Rome to attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, from which she graduated in 2003. A year later, she made her first appearance on the big screen in a minor role in Carlo Mazzacurati’s L’amore ritrovato (An Italian Romance, 2004). After playing the female lead in Christian Angeli’s quirky short Fare bene mikles (Being Good at Mikles, 2005) and being part of the team chaotically attempting to make a film in the Licaoni’s web-distributed Kiss Me Lorena (2005), she came to wider notice playing the dour sister in Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007) and as Antonio Albanese’s daughter in Silvio Soldini’s Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds, 2007), for which she received her first David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actress. After being the betrayed wife in Anna Negri’s ensemble film-within-a-film Riprendimi (2008), she gave an extraordinary performance as the emotionally fragile Giovanna in Pupi Avati’s Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father, 2008), a role that earned her both an Italian Golden Globe and the David for Best Actress. Having in less than five years established herself as a magnetic presence on the Italian screen, she subsequently appeared in many of the key films of both emerging and established directors, including playing the daughter, Elisabetta Recchi, in Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009); the young peasant, Beniamina, in Giorgio Diritti’s L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come, 2009); Anna, the young wife enticed into a torrid extramarital love affair in Soldini’s Cosa voglio di più (Come Undone, 2010); and the very fragile Alice in Saverio Costanzo’s La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2010). She again played the daughter in Marco Bellocchio’s Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty, 2012) before being the young female academic risking her life by carrying out research in an unsafe laboratory in Costanza Quatriglio’s short docudrama Con il fiato sospeso (With Held Breath, 2013). After playing the mother

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in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders (2014), her sister’s enchanting semiautobiographical film revolving around a rural family of beekeepers, she provided one of her most nuanced and moving performances in Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts (2014), deservedly rewarded at Venice with both the prestigious Volpi Cup and the Pasinetti Award for Best Actress. This was followed by another extraordinary performance in a powerful exploration of transsexuality in Laura Bispuri’s Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin, 2015). She returned to work with Bispuri, playing the unruly biological mother disputing custody of her 10-year-old daughter with the foster mother, in Mia Figlia (Daughter of Mine, 2018) and again with her sister, Alice, in Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018). At the same time, she appeared on national television in the eight-part series Il miracolo (The Miracle, 2018) and provided the voice-over in the first season of L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2018), Costanzo’s adaptation of the first novel of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Most recently, having now achieved an international reputation, she has also worked with a number of European directors, appearing in Markus Schleinzer’s Angelo (2018) and in Bas Devos’s portrait of a wounded and frightened Brussels following the carnage of the 2016 terrorist attack, Hellhole (2019).

Alba Rohrwacher in Laura Bispuri’s Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin, 2015). Courtesy of Photofest.

ROHRWACHER, ALICE (1981–). Writer and director. Younger sister of actress Alba Rohrwacher, Alice Rohrwacher has been hailed as one of the most promising young Italian directors to have emerged in the second decade

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of the new millennium. After graduating in classics from the University of Turin, she worked for a period in children’s theater while earning a living editing documentaries. In 2005, she helped film and edit Pierpaolo Giarolo’s Un piccolo spettacolo (A Small Show), an hour-long record of the last days in Italy of the traveling Circo Saluna, which won the first prize for documentary at that year’s Rome Film Festival. A year later, she wrote and directed “Il giardiniere della fiumara” (“The River Gardener”), a short episode for the collective documentary Checosamanca (What’s Missing, 2006). Having continued to work as an editor on others’ documentaries, in 2011 she was able to write and direct her own first feature, Corpo celeste (Celestial Body, 2011). A delicately wrought coming-of-age narrative dovetailing as a spiritual quest, it received a very warm welcome when it premiered at Cannes in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs, and in Italy, it brought her the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. Three years later, her second feature, Le Meraviglie (The Wonders, 2014), another charming coming-of-age narrative but in the context of a rural family of beekeepers not unlike the Rohrwacher family itself, screened in competition for the Palme d’or at Cannes where, in the event, it received the Grand Jury Prize. The film so impressed no less than Italian American director and producer Martin Scorsese that he undertook to act as coproducer and distribute Rohrwacher’s film worldwide, including making it available on Netflix. After contributing “Una canzone” (“A Song”), a 10-minute montage of found footage from the Istituto LUCE’s archive, to the ensemble documentary 9x10 novanta (2014), and the short De Djess Miu Miu Women’s Tales (2015), created on commission for the Prada fashion house, she also made a foray into opera, directing a version of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata at the Teatro di Reggio Emilia. Two years later, she confirmed her growing reputation as one of the most impressive up-andcoming young filmmakers in Italy with her third feature, Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018). The complex and poetic portrayal of a rural Italy transformed by the inexorable advance of modernity but experienced through the eyes of a young peasant with the unshakeable wonder and innocence of a saint, Lazzaro won the prize for Best Screenwriting at Cannes and, in Italy, was nominated for the Nastro d’argento for Best Film. On the strength of her remarkable first three features, Rohrwacher was invited to be a member of the jury that annually decides the Academy Awards. At the same time, she has been approached to direct two episodes of the second season of the RAIHBO television series to be adapted from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, titled Storia del nuovo cognome (The Story of a New Name). ROMA CITTÀ APERTA (ROME OPEN CITY, 1945; AKA OPEN CITY). Film. Universally acknowledged as the founding film of Italian Neorealism, Roma città aperta was Roberto Rossellini’s fourth feature film but his first of the postwar period. Among the many myths that have grown up around

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this legendary film is that Rossellini began shooting it secretly while Rome was still under German occupation. This is, however, only a myth and it is now generally accepted that Rossellini actually began shooting the film in January 1945, six months after Rome had been liberated by Allied troops. Provisionally titled Storie di ieri (Stories of Yesterday), the film resulted from the merger of a number of different projects. These included a documentary on a priest who had been executed by the Germans for helping the Resistance, for which Rossellini had been commissioned by a pious Roman countess, and a feature on the black market that screenwriter Sergio Amidei had been sketching out for maverick producer Giuseppe Amato. As a Communist asked to work on Rossellini’s project, Amidei objected to the idea of a Catholic priest representing the entire Resistance and so firmly insisted on incorporating the parallel story of a Communist Resistance leader who is betrayed by his lover and consequently tortured to death by the Germans. Also to be included was a story reported in the newspapers about a Roman housewife and mother who had been killed by the Germans in front of her family for attempting to pass food to her arrested husband. All these strands were eventually merged to create the film’s composite narrative, which then became the following: in German-occupied Rome in mid-1944, Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a Communist leader of the Resistance, is being hunted by the Gestapo and takes refuge at the apartment of his friend and fellow Resistance member Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet). While waiting for his friend’s return, Giorgio meets Francesco’s bride-to-be, Pina (Anna Magnani), a war widow and mother who, on Giorgio’s request, sends her young son, Marcello (Vito Annichiarico), to bring back the parish priest, Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), who, unbeknownst to Pina and the others around her, also works for the Resistance by forging identity papers. We later learn that Pina’s son, too, is part of a group of boys who carry out their own military actions against the occupying Germans. Don Pietro arrives and agrees to take Giorgio’s place in delivering a crucial sum of money to a group of waiting partisans on the outskirts of the city, and there is a short period of calm as everyone prepares for Francesco and Pina’s wedding, which has been set for the following day. The next morning, however, as everyone is readying for the occasion, the Germans carry out a raid of the entire quarter, and Giorgio, Francesco, and a number of other men are taken away in a truck. In what remains one of the most powerful sequences in the film, and perhaps one of the most indelible moments in film history, Pina desperately chases the vehicle while continually calling out Francesco’s name but is abruptly cut down by machine-gun fire. The German convoy with the truck is attacked by partisans, and Giorgio and Francesco manage to escape. However, not knowing that his lover, Marina (Maria Michi), has become a pawn of the Germans through her friendship with Major Bergmann’s translator, Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), and her depen-

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dence on the drugs that Ingrid procures for her from the major, Giorgio leads Francesco to an appointment with Marina at a restaurant, following which, having nowhere else to spend the night, they take up Marina’s offer to sleep at her apartment. At one point in the evening, however, Giorgio and Marina have an argument, during which Giorgio breaks off their relationship. Marina is deeply resentful, and having overheard Giorgio’s plans to leave Rome the next day after picking up false documents from Don Pietro, she communicates the information to Ingrid, with the result that on the following day Giorgio and Don Pietro are arrested as they leave the church grounds, with Francesco only narrowly escaping the ambush due to the extra time he has taken to say good-bye to Marcello. The rest of the film takes place at the Gestapo headquarters and is largely taken up with Giorgio’s interrogation and torture by the SS Major Bergmann. Heroically steadfast, Giorgio refuses to disclose any sources or contacts and dies under torture. Similarly interrogated by Major Bergmann, Don Pietro also refuses to provide any information and is subsequently executed by a firing squad. As Don Pietro dies, Marcello and the group of boy partisans, who have been watching from a distance, whistle a defiant tune in unison before turning to walk back toward a city dominated by the dome of the Vatican.

The execution of Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945). Courtesy of Photofest.

Although it has become traditional to praise the film for its quasi-documentary realism, its dependence on fairly conventional melodramatic stratagems is readily apparent. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that what Rossellini

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managed to create was a very different sort of film from anything that had been seen in Italy up to that time. Undoubtedly part of its immediate appeal was also the way in which it idealistically articulated the possibility of a popular alliance between Catholic and Marxist forces in a post-Fascist Italy, a hope that was widespread at the time but laid to rest only the following year with the forcible ejection of the Communist Party from the provisional government. Another oft-repeated myth that has grown up around this legendary film, one mischievously aided and abetted by Rossellini himself, is that it was poorly received when first released in Rome in September 1945. Reviews and newspaper reports suggest the contrary, with the film widely hailed by critics and the public alike as a major cinematic achievement and a new beginning for the Italian cinema. The film was seen by almost three million Italians in its first four months of screening and became the highestgrossing Italian film of the 1945–1946 season. Its overwhelming national success was soon repeated abroad, with the film screening for two consecutive years in New York and winning, among others, the New York Film Critics Award, two awards from the National Board of Review, and an Oscar nomination. Shown at Cannes in 1946, the film also won the Grand Festival Prize. Justifiably regarded as a milestone in both Italian and world cinema, the film, and all the drama that went into its making, was fictionally, but respectfully, later revisited in Carlo Lizzani’s Celluloide (Celluloid, 1995). ROSI, FRANCESCO (1922–2015). Director and screenwriter. After abandoning legal studies at university, undertaken only to please his father, and following various unsuccessful attempts at making a living as an illustrator of children’s books and a vaudeville actor, Rosi began his film career in earnest as principal assistant to Luchino Visconti on La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). A year later, when the film had failed dismally at the box office, in part because the authentic Sicilian dialect spoken by the nonprofessional actors was incomprehensible to general Italian audiences, Rosi was given the task of supervising the dubbing of the original film into standard Italian. Having acquitted himself well in the task, he served a further apprenticeship assisting Raffaello Matarazzo on two of the latter’s most successful melodramas and Luciano Emmer on Domenica d’agosto (Sunday in August, 1950) and Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris Is Always Paris, 1951) before returning to work with Visconti again on Bellissima (1951). His reputation as an assistant director now well established, he was called to work with Michelangelo Antonioni on I vinti (The Vanquished, 1953) and to complete Camicie rosse (Anita Garibaldi, 1952) after Goffredo Alessandrini had abandoned the project.

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After further work as assistant director, screenwriter, and dubber, and having also produced a number of radio plays, he finally directed his first solo feature, La sfida (The Challenge, 1958). The gritty story of an ambitious young tough trying to wrest control of the Neapolitan fruit market from an already established underworld network, the film was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival and a Nastro d’argento for Best Original Story. While Rosi’s next film, I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), the story of a group of Italian immigrant workers in Germany in the immediate postwar period, elicited a less enthusiastic critical reception, Salvatore Giuliano (1962), a meticulous forensic reconstruction of the death of the famous Sicilian bandit that brought to the surface all the inconsistencies of the official version of events, confirmed Rosi as one of the foremost directors of his generation. Stunningly photographed by Gianni Di Venanzo, the film was regaled with a host of prizes including the Silver Lion at Berlin. What would become Rosi’s characteristic tendency to use cinema to analyze the complex interplay between legal and illegal power networks within social processes again came to the fore in Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City, 1963), a brilliant close-up study of rampant real-estate speculation and political power in postwar Naples, which again received a host of tributes, including the Golden Lion at Venice. After Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965), the portrait of a young man’s ill-fated move from the country to the city in search of fame and fortune, set and filmed completely in Spain, and the rather uncharacteristic romantic fable C’era una volta (More Than a Miracle, 1967), Rosi returned to a cinema of strong civic engagement and social commitment with Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago, 1970), a film that deconstructed all the heroic myths regarding Italy’s participation in World War I. This was followed by another series of major and highly acclaimed films beginning with Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972), another investigative film, this time into the “accidental” death in the early 1960s of Italian entrepreneur and oil magnate Enrico Mattei; Lucky Luciano (1974), a portrait of the Italian American gangster that highlighted the way in which he was as much a tool of greater political powers as a crime boss in his own right; and Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), adapted from a speculative novel by Leonardo Sciascia in which a police commissioner, investigating what on the surface appears to be the revenge killing of a number of judges, comes to find himself enmeshed in a much more complex web of governmental and political machinations. Rosi’s next film, originally made as a four-part television miniseries, was a sensitive and effective adaptation of Carlo Levi’s landmark novel about southern Italy, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979). This was followed by a perfect blending of the personal and the political in Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), an elegiac but unsentimental examination of Italian society at the beginning of the 1980s that was ac-

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claimed not only in Italy, where it won three Silver Ribbons and four David di Donatello awards, but also abroad, where it was nominated for an Oscar and received the Boston Society of Film Critics award for Best Foreign Film. Less openly political perhaps than Rosi’s previous films but nevertheless an electrifying adaptation of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1984), was again swamped with prizes and awards, winning no less than seven Davids in Italy, a César in France, and a Golden Globe in the United States. Following a fine adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987), Rosi attempted a return to his more socially committed cinema in the early 1990s with Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo Connection, 1990). Although coscripted with Gore Vidal, the film was generally judged to be less successful in laying bare the interweaving of political and criminal power networks than many of his earlier films. In the wake of his disappointment at the reception of Dimenticare Palermo, Rosi directed only one other major film, a very creditable adaptation of Primo Levi’s Holocaust-survivor memoir La Tregua (The Truce, 1997), before devoting himself entirely to the theater. In 2012, he was presented with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

Francesco Rosi on set. Courtesy of Photofest.

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ROSI, GIANFRANCO (1964–). Screenwriter, cinematographer, director, and producer. A leading figure of the most recent generation of Italian documentary filmmakers, Rosi was born in Asmara, Eritrea, of Italian parents. At 13, he was flown to Italy for safety without his parents and, for a period, lived with relatives between Rome and Istanbul. At 20, he moved to America, where he studied film at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Following his graduation, a visit to India resulted in his first documentary, Boatman (1993), the closely observed portrait of a day in the life of an Indian boatman plying his trade on the Ganges River. Ably exploring the complexity of the Hindu attitude to life and death, the one-hour film was screened and competed for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1994 Sundance Festival. In 2000, Rosi collaborated as cinematographer and codirector on Afterwords, a short experimental film produced by the Benetton Fabrica and screened at the Venice Festival that year. Filmed over five years at Slab City, a disused military base somewhere in the California desert in an area reputedly below the level of the sea, Rosi’s second documentary, Below Sea Level (2008), followed the lives and the comings and goings of a number of its transient inhabitants. Similarly screened at Venice, it won both the prestigious Doc/it and the Venice Horizons Documentary Award. Made two years later, El sicario—room 164 (2010) consisted entirely of an interview in a closed hotel room with a former hit man for the Mexican drug cartels, head and face completely hidden for the entire time by a black mesh hood. After a lifetime of torturing and killing hundreds of people, the unnamed sicario had converted to Christianity, and Rosi’s film offered him the chance to make a cathartic confession before most likely suffering the same fate as his many victims. An intense and disconcerting viewing experience—made worse by the series of precise diagrams with which el sicario illustrated his evil deeds in detail—the film received the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (FIPRESCI) prize and the Biografilm Documentary Award at Venice. In preparation for his next film, Rosi filmed a long interview with renowned architect and former Rome municipal councillor Renato Nicolini, editing it to make the short Tanti futuri possibili—con Renato Nicolini (Many Futures Possible—with Renato Nicolini, 2012). A year later, after three years of preparation, Sacro GRA (2013) offered a fractured mosaic of both ordinary and eccentric lives lived in the marginal hinterland created by the Great Ring Road (GRA) that encircles Rome. The film was a major triumph for Rosi, winning the Golden Lion at Venice and earning nominations for both the David and the European Film Award as Best Documentary of the year. Two years later, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016) would go further. A portrait of everyday life on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, now regularly punctuated by the arrival of leaky boats bearing thousands of desperate refugees from Africa, the film won both the Golden Bear and the Ecumenical

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Jury Prize at Berlin, a César nomination for Best Documentary in France, the European Film Award for Documentary, and in Italy a Special Nastro d’argento and David nominations for Best Film and Best Director. It also became Italy’s preferred candidate for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Under wraps but well in preparation, Rosi’s next film, Notturno, is currently eagerly awaited. ROSSELLINI, RENZO (1908–1982). Composer. Younger brother of director Roberto Rossellini, Renzo showed an early propensity for musical composition, publishing his first opera with the renowned musical firm Ricordi at the age of only 16. After completing his studies at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, he became director of the Liceo Musicale at Varese and, between 1940 and 1942, taught composition at the Pesaro Conservatory. He began composing for films in the mid-1930s, his first scores being for Guido Brignone’s L’antenato (The Ancestor, 1936) and Mario Camerini’s Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1937). He composed for another dozen films, including Vittorio De Sica’s Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940), and Teresa Venerdì (Doctor Beware, 1941), before also scoring his brother’s first feature film, La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941). He subsequently composed the music for all his brother’s films, up to and including Vanina Vanini (The Betrayer, 1961), receiving the Nastro d’argento for his score for Paisà (Paisan, 1946). In 1948, he won his second Nastro for his music for Giacomo Gentilomo’s I fratelli Karamazoff (The Brothers Karamazov, 1947). For another decade, he worked prolifically, scoring some 50 more films, ranging from Raffaello Matarazzo’s La schiava del peccato (The Slave of Sin, 1954) and Dino Risi’s Il segno di Venere (The Sign of Venus, 1955) to Luigi Zampa’s La ragazza del Palio (The Love Specialist, 1957) and Vittorio Cottafavi’s Le legioni di Cleopatra (Legions of the Nile, 1959). Nevertheless, following Vanina Vanini, he withdrew completely from the cinema, returning only to score Luigi Bazzoni’s La donna del lago (The Possessed, 1965) and to contribute some of his music to one of the several versions of Tinto Brass’s Caligola (Caligula, 1979). ROSSELLINI, ROBERTO (1906–1977). Director and screenwriter. Universally acknowledged as the father of Italian Neorealism, Rossellini was born into a wealthy family and a privileged environment. His father was a successful builder-architect and a published writer with a love of music, and the family home was a place of encounter for many local artists and intellectuals. One of the many buildings that Rossellini’s father had built in Rome

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was the Corso cinema, and it was here that the young Roberto, thanks to a permanent pass provided by his father, was able to watch a multitude of films and to develop a particular love of American cinema. He had an easy upbringing, avoiding school and doing largely whatever he pleased, which included driving fast cars and chasing women. His extensive womanizing, in fact, led to an early marriage with actress Assia Noris, although it appears the marriage was soon annulled. Rossellini would then marry Marcella De Marchis, with whom he would have two sons, but he would also carry on myriad affairs with, among others, Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman, who also bore him several children. But that was still to come. In the early 1930s, with much of the family fortune dissipated and confronted with the necessity of finding a job, Rossellini began to work in the film industry, first as a dubbing assistant and then as an uncredited script editor. His first attempts at filmmaking began in 1936 when he made the first of what would be a handful of short animated nature fantasies, two of which, Il tacchino prepotente (The Bullying Turkey, 1939) and La vispa Teresa (Lively Teresa, 1939), were photographed by a young Mario Bava. At the same time, Rossellini was able to work as a fully accredited screenwriter and assistant to Goffredo Alessandrini on Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938), a heroic action melodrama nominally produced and supervised by the Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini. Two years later, Rossellini was given his first chance to direct with La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941), a film about an Italian hospital ship that he took over from navy-commander-turned-film-director Francesco De Robertis. The film, which used stock footage and nonprofessional actors, was highly praised and received a special jury prize, which allowed Rossellini to go on to make the other two films that form part of what is commonly called his Fascist trilogy: Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942), from a story written by Vittorio Mussolini and with Michelangelo Antonioni collaborating on the screenplay, and L’uomo dalla croce (The Man of the Cross, completed 1942 but only released in 1943), recounting the deeds of a heroic Italian military chaplain at the Russian front. These films, largely financed and made at the behest of the Italian military, would later be cited by hostile critics as proof of Rossellini’s active support for the war and for Fascism, but a more dispassionate viewing would see them as generically humanist in tone rather than stridently nationalistic. Rossellini’s first major triumph, however, and his elevation to the front ranks of international directors, came with Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), a film set during the recent German occupation of the city, recounting the heroism of both Resistance fighters and the ordinary Roman populace. The film’s relatively rough and improvised style, dictated in part by circumstances, was hailed both at home and abroad as marking the birth

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of a radically new form of socially committed cinema that soon came to be labeled Neorealism. Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini, the film was feted everywhere, winning the American Board of Review Award, the Grand Prize at the Cannes Festival, and a nomination for an Academy Award. Its remarkable success turned Rossellini into a celebrity overnight and allowed him to finance the other two films that comprise what is usually referred to as his war trilogy: Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947), both portraying wartime situations with a very strong sense of realism. With the war now beginning to recede from memory, Rossellini began to focus more on an exploration of inner psychological conflict, beginning with the two episodes of L’amore (Ways of Love, 1948), both starring Anna Magnani, and continuing with a series of films made with Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman, who had chosen to join him in Italy (and whom he would soon marry): Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, 1950), Europa ’51 (The Greatest Love, 1952), and Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1953). However, despite their strong realism and their undeniable dramatic power, the Bergman films were received very poorly by most Italian critics for what was seen as an emphasis on the individual and thus a deviation from the more socially oriented concerns of the earlier films. The films were, however, received very warmly in France, especially by the young critics who would later become the directors of the French New Wave and for whom Rossellini became, and remained, something of a mentor. Following the further lack of success of other films such as Dov’è la libertà? (Where Is Freedom?, 1954) and La paura—non credo più all’amore (Fear, 1954), Rossellini and cinematographer Aldo Tonti spent almost two years in India gathering material for what would become a 10-episode documentary series for Italian television, as well as a full-feature documentary for the big screen, India Matri Bhumi (India, 1959). The latter was enthusiastically acclaimed when shown at Cannes and raised Rossellini’s stocks at home, where the film was favorably compared with the documentaries of Robert Flaherty. With his reputation slightly restored, Rossellini returned to the theme of the war and the Resistance with Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) and Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night, 1960) before making Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi, 1961), a film that intended to celebrate the centenary of Garibaldi’s expedition to southern Italy and effectively initiated that didactic exploration of the past that would soon become the distinguishing feature of Rossellini’s television productions. And indeed, following Vanina Vanini (The Betrayer, 1961), another historical costume drama set in the context of the Risorgimento, and Anima nera (Black Soul, 1961), a modest contribution to the commedia all’italiana, Rossellini turned his attention almost exclusively to television and, for the next decade and a half, attempted to use it as a didactic tool.

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Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman on the set of Stromboli (1950). Courtesy of Photofest.

La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Rise of Louis XIV, 1966), made originally for French television, is undoubtedly the most accomplished of his television films, but Rossellini continued his exploration of history with the encyclopedic La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza (Man’s Struggle for Survival, made 1967–1969 and shown in 12 episodes, 1970–1971), Atti degli Apostoli (Acts of the Apostles, made 1968, screened in five episodes, 1969), Socrate (Socrates, 1970), Blaise Pascal (1971), Agostino d’Ippona

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(Augustine of Hippo, 1972), L’età di Cosimo de’ Medici (The Age of the Medici, 1973), and Cartesius (Descartes, 1974). He returned to the big screen in 1974 with Anno Uno (Year One), a film about Christian Democrat leader and long-serving Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi, but neither it nor Il Messia (The Messiah, 1975), Rossellini’s attempt to present the life of Christ from a layman’s perspective, found anything more than a cordial reception in an Italy that had changed radically since the days of Rome Open City. Unperturbed, Rossellini began preparing a film on Karl Marx. Titled Vivere per l’umanità (To Live for Humanity), it was apparently in an advanced stage of preparation when Rossellini suddenly died from a heart attack in 1977. ROTA, NINO (1911–1979). Composer. Coming from a long line of musicians, Nino Rota, born Giovanni Rota Rinaldi, was something of a child prodigy. His first work, the oratorio L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista (The Childhood of St. John the Baptist), was written at the age of 11 and performed publicly in Paris and Milan when he was only 12. In the same year, he was admitted to the Milan Conservatorium, where he studied with Ildebrando Pizzetti before moving to the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome to study composition under Alfredo Casella. After graduating in 1930, he spent two years in the United States, studying under Rosario Scalera and Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia. He returned to Italy in 1933 and undertook a degree in literature at the University of Milan. Then, after teaching at the Liceo Musicale of Taranto for a year, he was invited to teach harmony and composition at the Bari Conservatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life, serving as director of the institute from 1950 onward. Rota’s musical oeuvre was considerable and includes 10 operas, three symphonies, two oratorios, six concertos, a number of ballets, chamber pieces, and a great deal of music for theater and radio. He is, however, best remembered for his numerous and melodic film scores. Beginning with Raffaello Matarazzo’s Treno popolare (People’s Train, 1933), Rota composed the music for more than 150 films, collaborating with major Italian directors such as Alberto Lattuada, Renato Castellani, Mario Monicelli, Franco Zeffirelli, and Luchino Visconti, for whom he scored Senso (1954), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), and Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Above all, however, Rota is remembered for his prolific partnership with Federico Fellini, having provided the distinctive and often haunting soundtracks of all of Fellini’s films from Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) to Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978). Rota also worked with a number of international directors such as King Vidor, Edward Dmytryk, René Clément, and Sergei Bondarchuk, but he achieved his greatest world renown from his extensive collaboration with Francis Ford Coppo-

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la on the first two of Coppola’s Godfather films, receiving the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score for The Godfather: Part II (1974). Having already won four Nastri d’argento for earlier films, he was also awarded a David di Donatello in 1977 for his score for Il casanova di Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976). In 1995, a foundation was instituted in his name to honor his memory and encourage great musical composition. ROTUNNO, GIUSEPPE (1923–). Cinematographer. Rotunno began in the film industry as a still photographer at the age of 17. His career was interrupted in 1942 when he was conscripted and sent to Greece as a film reporter but then captured and interned by the Germans when Italy signed the armistice in 1943. After returning to Italy in 1945, he served an apprenticeship as assistant to G. R. Aldo on a number of films, which included Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952), before graduating to director of photography on Dino Risi’s Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento, 1955). In the following years, he worked with most of the leading Italian directors, including Valerio Zurlini, Mario Monicelli, Lina Wertmüller, and Vittorio De Sica. He was cinematographer for Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), and Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967), and he worked for Federico Fellini on a host of films that included Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969), Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1972), Amarcord (1973), Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976), Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1978), and E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983). Much respected on both sides of the Atlantic—in 1959 he had already photographed Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959)—he was also called to work with Mike Nichols on Carnal Knowledge (1971) and with Bob Fosse on All That Jazz (1979), a contribution that earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. In the late 1990s, with more than 70 films to his credit, Rotunno retired from the industry in order to continue teaching at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Having already garnered a string of prizes during his career, among them three David di Donatello awards and seven Nastri d’argento, in 1999 Rotunno was also recognized with the Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award and the International Award from the American Society of Cinematographers. Further highlighting his contribution to world cinema, in 2006 he was awarded a special 50th-anniversary David di Donatello. RUBINI, SERGIO (1959–). Actor, director, and screenwriter. After studying at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, Rubini worked on the stage, both as an actor and director, as well as writing and performing plays

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for radio. He made his acting debut in cinema as the son hopelessly addicted to drugs in Valentino Orsini’s Figlio mio infinitamente caro (My Dearest Son, 1985) before also playing the son of kidnapped Italian statesman Aldo Moro in Giuseppe Ferrara’s Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair, 1986). His film career received its biggest boost, however, when Federico Fellini cast him as his young alter ego in Intervista (Fellini’s Intervista, 1987). He subsequently appeared in Giuseppe Piccioni’s popular coming-of-age saga Il grande Blek (The Mighty Blek, 1987) and Andrea Del Carlo’s Treno di panna (Cream Train, 1988) before directing himself and his wife, Margherita Buy, in his first feature film, La stazione (The Station, 1990). Adapted from a play by Umberto Marino, which Rubini had already performed onstage, the film was showered with praise and received both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director as well as the International Federation of Film Critics Award. Continuing to display great talent and versatility, he subsequently appeared in a wide variety of films, including Carlo Verdone’s Al lupo al lupo (Wolf, Wolf, 1992), Giuseppe Tornatore’s Una pura formalità (A Pure Formality, 1994), Gabriele Salvatores’s Nirvana (1997), and Francesca Archibugi’s L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon, 1998) while also directing himself in Prestazione straordinaria (Working Overtime, 1994) and the historical costume drama Il viaggio della sposa (The Bride’s Journey, 1997). His acting talents received greater validation as he began to also appear in international productions, among them Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in which his performance as Police Inspector Roverini earned him a Silver Ribbon nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), where he played the minor but significant role of Dismas, the Good Thief crucified at Jesus’s right hand. In the new millennium, he continued to alternate between acting for others and directing himself in his own films, scoring another major triumph with La terra (Our Land, 2006), a taut family drama set in his native Puglia in which he himself played a repulsive loan shark intent on a land grab. After a lighter role in Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’amore 2 (Manual of Love 2), he directed Colpo d’occhio (At a Glance, 2008) in which he played the influential art critic who first promotes and then destroys the career of an ambitious young sculptor. He returned to his beloved Puglia and to the theme of art in his following L’uomo nero (The Cezanne Affair, 2009), a film transparently based on his own father, who had been both a humble stationmaster and a passionate art lover and amateur painter. As an actor who had once played Fellini, Rubini was here creating his own Amarcord. In 2011, succumbing to a desire to once again tread the floorboards of a live stage, he created A cuore aperto (With an Open Heart), an assemblage of anecdotes, enactments, and literary readings performed to live music, which he successfully toured throughout southern Italy. He soon returned to the big

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screen with Mi rifaccio vivo (I’ll Be Back, 2013) and Dobbiamo parlare (Let’s Talk, 2015). At the same time, indulging in his love of literature and making something of a return to his earlier radio days, he also recorded a complete reading of John Williams’s novel, Stoner, which was released as an audiobook. After providing a very moving performance as the last willing inhabitant of a town destroyed by an earthquake in Pippo Mezzapesa’s Il bene mio (My Own Good, 2018) and a subsequent riotous romp through 17th-century France as one of the four Musketeers in Veronesi’s Moschiettieri del re—la penultima missione (King’s Musketeers—the Penultimate Mission, 2018), he directed and acted in his most recent Il grande spirito (The Great Spirit, 2019), a film he characterized as an urban Western, set in the highly industrialized, and extremely polluted, southern Italian port city of Taranto. RULLI, STEFANO (1949–). Film historian and screenwriter. After convening a historic conference on Neorealism at the Pesaro Young Cinema Festival in 1974, Rulli collaborated with Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, and Sandro Petraglia in writing and directing Matti da slegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1975), a three-hour documentary on Italian mental asylums, and La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine, 1979), a five-part television documentary on the seamier aspects of the Italian film industry. He subsequently teamed up regularly with Petraglia to write several popular television series, including the long-running La piovra (Octopus, 1987–1994) and many of the key films made by the directors of the so-called New Italian Cinema, among them Daniele Luchetti’s Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991) and Gianni Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). Rulli and Petraglia achieved what remains perhaps their greatest success together scripting Marco Tullio Giordana’s six-hour epic La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which they received the David di Donatello, the Nastro d’argento, and the Italian Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. In 2004, Rulli’s own Un silenzio particolare (A Particular Silence), a feature documentary about autism, was given the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub) Special Mention and the Young Cinema Prize for Best Digital Film at the Venice Festival and subsequently also received the 2005 David for Best Documentary. Rulli collaborated once again with Petraglia on the screenplays of Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005) and Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005), the latter earning them both another shared David di Donatello award. In the following decade, they regularly collaborated on the screenplays of some dozen other films and television series, including Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007), which earned them another David award; Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage (Piaz-

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za Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, 2012); Gabriele Salvatores’s Educazione siberiana (Deadly Code, 2013); and Stefano Sollima’s Suburra (2015). In the period between 2012 and 2016, Rulli also served as president of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, which oversees Italy’s National Film School and National Cinematheque. RUSTICHELLI, CARLO (1916–2004). Musician and composer. A versatile and prolific composer with more than 250 original film scores to his credit, in addition to his arrangements for many others, Rustichelli studied piano in Bologna and then composition at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. In the 1930s and 1940s, he composed mostly operas and theater music but also made a first foray into composing for film with his collaboration on the score of Mario Bonnard’s Papà per una notte (Dad for a Night, 1939). However, his more regular involvement with cinema came in the postwar period, beginning with his music for Pietro Germi’s Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, 1948). He subsequently wrote the music for all of Germi’s films, including the Oscar-winning Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961), although he received his first Nastro d’argento for his score of Germi’s lesser-known L’uomo di paglia (A Man of Straw, 1959). He also came to work with all the other, both major and minor, Italian directors across a wide variety of genres, moving easily from Spaghetti Westerns and peplums to social comedies and the classic horror thrillers of Mario Bava. He collaborated extensively with Mario Monicelli, earning another Nastro d’argento for his score of Monicelli’s L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold, 1966), and with Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom he arranged the music for Accattone (Accattone!, 1961), Mamma Roma (1962), and Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew, 1964). After an intense involvement that saw him sometimes score more than 20 films in a single year, he began to reduce his participation in films in the early 1980s; his last major contribution was the score for Nanni Loy’s Amici miei atto III (My Friends, Part 3, 1985).

S SACHER FILM. Production company. Founded in Rome in 1987 by Angelo Barbagallo and actor-director Nanni Moretti with the aim of helping talented young directors to make their first films, in its first years Sacher produced or coproduced (often in partnership with RAI television) Carlo Mazzacurati’s Notte italiana (Italian Night, 1987), Daniele Luchetti’s Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow, 1988) and Il portaborse (The Yes Man, 1991), Moretti’s own Palombella rossa (Red Wood Pigeon, 1989) and Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), and Mimmo Calopresti’s La seconda volta (The Second Time, 1995). In 1989, the company also instituted the Premio Sacher (Sacher Prize), with the first Sacher d’oro (Golden Sacher) being awarded that year to Marco Risi’s Mery per sempre (Forever Mary, 1989). In 1991, the company also opened an independent art house cinema in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, screening films in the original language, and in 1996, it initiated the annual Sacher Film Festival. From 1997, the company also operated as a distributor under the name of Tandem. Among the company’s biggest production successes in the new millennium have been Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003) and Moretti’s own Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), both recipients of the David di Donatello prize for Best Film. However, since Barbagallo’s departure in 2007 the company has largely restricted itself to producing Moretti’s own Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope, 2011), Mia madre (My Mother, 2015), and Santiago, Italia (2018). In 2013, after serving as something of a beacon for independent filmmaking in Italy in the past three decades, Sacher announced that the company would be bowing to financial pressures and be suspending its distribution activities. SALCE, LUCIANO (1922–1989). Actor, playwright, screenwriter, and film and theater director. After graduating from the National Academy of Dramatic Art in 1947, Salce established a strong reputation as a stage actor, working with directors such as Giorgio Strehler and Luchino Visconti. In the early 1950s, he spent several years in Brazil, where he became artistic director of the Teatro Brasileiro da Comedia and directed two films for the Vera Cruz 429

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film company, Uma pulga na Balança (A Flea on the Scales, 1953) and Floradas na Serra (Flowering in the Mountains, 1954). Having returned to Italy, he resumed his extensive involvement with the theater while also frequently appearing on the screen in small roles in many of the light comedies directed by Steno (Stefano Vanzina). In 1960, he directed his first film, Le pillole di Ercole (Hercules’ Pills, 1960), which was soon followed by what many still regard as his two best films, Il federale (The Fascist, 1961) and La voglia matta (Crazy Desire, 1962), both of which helped reveal the considerable acting range of Ugo Tognazzi, until then largely regarded as a television comic. In the following years, while continuing to work in theater, radio, and television, Salce also directed another dozen voluble, but often uneven, comedies in the satirical vein of the commedia all’italiana. In the mid-1970s, however, he managed to achieve a huge box office success with the first two films featuring the inept character of Fantozzi, Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The Second Tragic Fantozzi, 1976). Unfortunately, this success was not repeated in any of the handful of comedies he made subsequently, including those in which he worked with Fantozzi actor Paolo Villaggio. His last film was the lackluster romantic teen comedy Quelli del casco (Those with the Helmets, 1988). SALVATORES, GABRIELE (1950–). Screenwriter and theater and film director. One of the most promising of the younger generation of filmmakers who emerged as part of the New Italian Cinema in the 1980s, Salvatores came to the cinema after a long and fruitful experience in theater. Indeed, his first film, Sogno di una notte d’estate (Dream of a Summer’s Night, 1983), was the screen adaptation of a rock musical version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he had previously directed to great acclaim at Milan’s Teatro dell’Elfo. In 1986, however, together with producer Maurizio Totti and actor Diego Abatantuono, he founded the Colorado Film production company, with which he made a number of bittersweet road movies that appeared to be giving voice to the last murmurs of the utopic aspirations of the 1968 generation. Having achieved a huge popularity in Italy with his portrayals of youthful male camaraderie in Marrakech Express (1989) and Turné (On Tour, 1990), he then scored his greatest triumph with Mediterraneo (1991), for which he received not only a David di Donatello and a Nastro d’argento at home but also the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. After a less successful reworking of many of the same elements in Puerto Escondido (1992), he began to experiment with more openly political themes in Sud (South, 1993), with digital imagery and computer games in the futuristic Nirvana (1997), and with split-screen narration in Amnesia (2002). His filmmaking reached a new level of maturity, however, with his luminous

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adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti’s best-selling novel Io non ho paura (I’m Not Scared, 2003), which was nominated for six David awards as well as for the Golden Bear at Berlin. He continued to innovate with Quo vadis, baby? (2005), an impressive experiment in using a mixture of digital, video, and filmic formats to create an effective neo-noir featuring a middle-aged, harddrinking female private detective. Three years later, he adapted another prize-winning novel by Ammaniti in the psychological thriller Come Dio commanda (As God Commands, 2008) before using found footage from the archives of national broadcaster RAI to create 1960 (2010), an engaging documentary visualizing his own nostalgic memories of Italy at the beginning of the 1960s. Demonstrating his eclecticism and versatility, in 2013 he directed Educazione Siberiana (Deadly Code), a crime drama based on the published autobiography of Moldovian writer Nicolai Lilin, recounting growing up in a community of criminal families in the small republic of Transnistria, before again changing direction to produce Italy in a Day (2014), a compelling documentary bringing together some 40,000 sequences, filmed by willing volunteers on one particular day and harvested via the internet and social media, to produce a living kaleidoscope of contemporary Italian life. This was followed by a very successful attempt to create a homegrown teen superhero in his Il ragazzo invisibile (The Invisible Boy, 2014), so popular that it prompted what may be only the first of a series of sequels, Il ragazzo invisibile: Seconda generazione (The Invisible Boy: Second Generation, 2018). SALVATORI, RENATO (1933–1988). Actor. A handsome, athletic lifeguard with no previous acting experience, Salvatori was discovered in his teens by director Luciano Emmer, who promptly cast him as Lucia Bosè’s jealous fiancé in Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952). After playing supporting roles in a number of relatively minor films, he came to national attention as one of the two male leads in Dino Risi’s extraordinarily popular Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful, 1957) and its equally successful sequel, Belle ma povere (Pretty but Poor, 1957), both of which topped the box office in their respective years. He subsequently appeared as one of the incompetent petty thieves in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) and in Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (The Magliari, 1959) before giving what is generally regarded as the most impressive performance of his entire career playing Simone in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). For the next 20 years, he continued to appear, although for the most part in supporting roles, in films by major Italian and international directors, among them Monicelli’s I Compagni (The Organizer, 1963), Gillo Pontecorvo’s Queimada (Burn!, 1969), Costa-Gavras’s Z (1968) and État de siège (State of Siege, 1972), and Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses,

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1976). In the early 1980s, however, he abandoned his acting career in order to engage in politics. His last appearance on the screen was in a minor role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La tragedia d’un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981). SANDRELLI, STEFANIA (1946–). Actress and director. One of the most accomplished and popular actresses of Italian postwar cinema, Sandrelli graduated to the silver screen after winning the Miss Cinema Viareggio beauty contest in 1960. Following a small part in Luciano Salce’s Il federale (The Fascist, 1961), she played her first significant role as Angela, the beautiful young cousin for whom Baron Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) disposes of his wife in Pietro Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961). She subsequently gave impressive performances as the victimized teenager in Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964) and the defenseless Adriana in Antonio Pietrangeli’s Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1965). In the following years, she played the wife of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Luis Trintignant) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970); a much less malleable wife in Germi’s Alfredo, Alfredo (1972), where she was pitted against Dustin Hoffman; and Luciana in Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974), where she gave one of her finest performances. After a host of other films in the late 1970s, she displayed her versatility and daring, but she also caused something of a scandal when she starred in Tinto Brass’s adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s explicitly erotic novel La chiave (The Key, 1983). In subsequent years, she alternated between playing similar strongly erotic roles as in Paolo Quaregna’s Una donna allo specchio (A Woman in the Mirror, 1984) and L’attenzione (The Lie, 1985), directed by her husband, Giovanni Soldati, and much more demure and vulnerable characters such as the cheerful mother but suffering wife in Francesca Archibugi’s Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay, 1988), for which she received both the Nastro d’argento and the David di Donatello for Best Actress. After a host of other awards, especially for her performances in Scola’s La cena (The Dinner, 1998) and Gabriele Muccino’s L’ultimo bacio (One Last Kiss, 2001), in 2005 she was presented with the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in recognition of her outstanding career. She subsequently became a familiar face for television audiences through her appearance in miniseries like Ricomincio da me (I’ll Start Over, 2005–2006) and Io e mamma (Me and Mama, 2007), in which she was flanked by her daughter, Amanda. She returned to the big screen in a supporting role in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day, 2008) before trying her hand at cowriting and codirecting her own first feature, Christine Cristina (2009), a portrait of the prolific medieval writer and early

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feminist Christine De Pisan. She returned in front of the camera again in Paolo Virzì’s La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing, 2010), in a role that rather cleverly alludes to her own past as an actress, and playing the mother again in Luca Lucini’s La donna della mia vita (The Woman of My Life, 2010). She turned to the small screen in 2012 where, over the next three years, she played the matriarch in the long-running RAI series Una grande famiglia (A Large Family, 2012–2015), followed by a similar role in the more dramatic series Non è stato mio figlio (It Wasn’t My Son, 2016). At the same time, she also chose to make her debut onstage, acting in the all-female cast of a production of Astrid Veillon’s Il bagno (The Bathroom), which toured nationally to packed houses. Patently comfortable with now taking on the role of the older woman, she returned to the screen again in Il crimine non va in pensione (Crime Does Not Retire, 2017), a lighthearted comedy about a heist planned by the inhabitants of an old people’s home. With more than 130 films and television series to her credit, and still much in demand, in 2018 Sandrelli was awarded a Special David for her long and illustrious career.

Stefania Sandrelli in Antonio Pietrangeli’s Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, 1965). Courtesy of Photofest.

SANSON, YVONNE (1926–2003). Actress. Greek-born Sanson moved to Italy in her teens in order to study but, within a few years, had embarked on a career in films. After a small part in Giuseppe Maria Scotese’s La grande aurora (The Great Dawn, 1946), she played her first major role as the mistress-become-wife in Alberto Lattuada’s Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender, 1947). She then achieved an extraordinary popularity

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as the female lead in the series of hugely successful melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, beginning with Catene (Chains, 1949) and continuing with Figli di Nessuno (Nobody’s Children, 1951), Chi è senza peccato (Whomever Is without Sin, 1952), L’Angelo bianco (The White Angel, 1955), and Malinconico autunno (Melancholic Autumn, 1959), in all of which she was paired with veteran male heartthrob Amedeo Nazzari. At the same time, she also acquitted herself well in supporting roles in films such as Lattuada’s Il cappotto (The Overcoat, 1952), Mario Camerini’s La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Beautiful Wife, 1955), and René Clément’s La diga sul Pacifico (This Angry Age, 1957). By the beginning of the 1960s, however, her career was in decline. She appeared as Olga Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman’s faded ex-lover, in Roberto Rossellini’s Anima nera (Black Soul, 1962) but subsequently made few other films until Bernardo Bertolucci, perhaps in homage to her earlier popularity, cast her in one of her very last roles as Giulia’s petit bourgeois mother in Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970). SCACCIANOCE, LUIGI (1914–1981). Art director and production designer. Scaccianoce studied design at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and worked with a number of minor Italian directors before collaborating (uncredited) on Orson Welles’s Othello (1951). His meticulous attention to historical detail earned him a Nastro d’argento for Best Production Design on Mauro Bolognini’s Senilità (Careless, 1962), an award repeated two years later for his design of Francesco Maselli’s Gli indifferenti (A Time of Indifference, 1964). He worked extensively with Pier Paolo Pasolini on Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew, 1964), Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966), and Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), and he collaborated closely with costume designer Danilo Donati to achieve the eerie and almost surreal atmosphere of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). He subsequently worked with Vittorio De Sica on the latter’s last two films, Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973) and Il viaggio (The Voyage, 1974). After winning the Nastro d’argento for his production design of Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (1979), Scaccianoce made his last major contribution to cinema on Édouard Molinaro’s La cage aux folles II (1980). SCAMARCIO, RICCARDO (1979–). Actor and producer. Having gained some experience acting in amateur theater as he was growing up in Andria (Puglia), Scamarcio moved to Rome at the age of 18 in order to study acting at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He left the Centro before graduating but was soon appearing on national television in the popular miniseries Compagni di scuola (School Companions, 2001). After a minor role in Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth,

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2003), he was catapulted to teen idol status playing the rebellious bad boy with a fragile heart, Stefano (Step) Mancini, in Tre metri sopra al cielo (Three Steps above Heaven, 2004). A year later, he appeared as the perfect man of the title in Luca Lucini’s L’uomo perfetto (The Perfect Man, 2005) and, at the same time, was also called by Michele Placido to play Il Nero (The Black), one of the tough young gangsters seeking control of the Roman underworld, in Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005). His glowering good looks and piercing green eyes continued to draw him back to playing the male heartthrob in numerous subsequent romantic comedies, but he also attempted to stretch himself further in more complex characterizations such as the older brother in Daniele Lucchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child, 2007), the ambitious young sculptor in Sergio Rubini’s Colpo d’occhio (At a Glance, 2008), and as Elias, the hapless illegal migrant attempting to reach the imagined utopia of Paris, France, in Costa-Gavra’s Eden à l’Ouest (Eden Is West, 2009). In the same year, he gave a very convincing performance as Sergio, the leader of one of the most deadly left-wing terrorist groups operating in Italy during the 1970s in Renato De Maria’s La prima linea (The Front Line, 2009), for which he received a Best Actor nomination for the Nastro d’argento. Having broadened his scope further by playing the younger of the two gay sons in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons, 2010), for which he attracted the Cineuphoria Award, he had acquired enough of an international reputation for Woody Allen to grant him a walk-on cameo as the hotel burglar in his To Rome with Love (2012). He continued to be drawn back to romantic comedies that exploited his good looks and sex symbol status in films such as Marco Ponti’s Io che amo solo te (I Who Love Only You, 2015) but also demonstrated an increase in the depth of his acting in family dramas such as Vincenzo Marra’s La prima luce (First Light, 2015) and in Sergio Castellito’s Nessuno si salva da solo (You Can’t Save Yourself Alone, 2015), which brought him his third Best Actor nomination for the David di Donatello. He subsequently slipped into playing implacable hit men and gangster bosses in Stefano Mordini’s Pericle il nero (Pericle, 2016) and in Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) before being the ambitious and only slightly less morally dubious entrepreneur, Sergio Morra, in Paolo Sorrentino’s Berlusconi saga, Loro (2018). After a dynamic performance as the ebullient gay brother of the fatally ill Matteo in Valeria Golino’s Euforia (Euphoria, 2018), which brought him his fourth David di Donatello Best Actor nomination, he has recently again crossed over to the dark side as Santo Russo, one of the most colorful but totally merciless crime bosses in Milan in the 1980s whose rise and fall is portrayed in Renato De Maria’s Lo spietato (The Ruthless, 2019).

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For the last decade, Scamarcio has also paired his acting career with that of film producer. In 2008, together with his then-partner, actress Valeria Golino, he founded the Buena Onda production company, with which he produced Golino’s directorial debut, the short Armandino e il madre (Armandino and the Madre, 2010) and her two subsequent feature films to date, Miele (Honey, 2013) and Euforia (Euphoria, 2018), Giuseppe M. Gaudino’s Per amor vostro (Anna, 2015), and Pappi Corsicato’s documentary Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (2017). Having in the past often declared his diffidence of the internet and social media, Scamarcio nevertheless now has his own dedicated website at www.riccardoscamarcio.net. SCARPELLI, FURIO (1919–2010). Screenwriter. One half of the famous Age e Scarpelli screenwriting team, Scarpelli worked regularly with Agenore Incrocci for almost four decades to create many of the great classics of Italian screen comedy. Their partnership began with a collaboration on Mario Monicelli’s Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949), the first of more than a dozen films they would help write for master comic actor Totò. After working together on a host of films ranging from romantic comedies to action adventures, in 1958 they laid the foundations for the so-called commedia all’italiana with their screenplay for Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), for which they shared their first Nastro d’argento. They subsequently wrote many of the great classics of the genre together, including La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), I mostri (The Monsters, 1963), and C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974). In 1965, they shared an Oscar nomination for their work on Monicelli’s I compagni (The Organizer, 1963), and in 1980, their script for Ettore Scola’s La terrazza (The Terrace) earned them the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes. They were both also credited with helping to write Sergio Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), although it appears that much of what they wrote was ultimately judged to be too comic and so not included in the final shooting script. Following his amicable professional separation from Incrocci in the mid1980s, Scarpelli continued his prolific activity as a screenwriter, collaborating in particular on many of Ettore Scola’s later films. He also frequently ventured into more dramatic territory with films such as Renzo Martinelli’s Porzus (1997) and Carlo Lizzani’s Celluloide (Celluloid, 1996). In 1996, after having already shared two Oscar nominations with Incrocci for earlier films, Scarpelli was nominated a third time for his collaboration on the sceenplay of Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman, 1994). After having written so many words in his long and fruitful career, in his last years he reprised his early passion for drawing and illustration, creating a number of

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illustrated children’s books that, however, only came to be published posthumously. His very last project was not only scripting but also supplying all the charming color drawings for Tormenti, an “illustrated film”—not “animated,” as he stressed, but a sort of graphic novel with voices—which he codirected with his nephew Filiberto. Released posthumously in 2011, the film was awarded a Special Nastro d’argento for being “a precious and original comedy.” SCOLA, ETTORE (1931–2016). Cartoonist, screenwriter, and director. Although he enrolled first in medicine and then in law at the University of Rome, Scola’s talent for comic sketches and cartoons drew him from an early age to work on the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio. There he met a host of other comic writers who would later also figure prominently in the Italian film industry, including Steno (Stefano Vanzina), Cesare Zavattini, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, Ruggero Maccari, and Furio Scarpelli. After serving an apprenticeship as uncredited gag writer on a host of madeto-order comedies such as Totò Tarzan (1950), he earned his first screenwriting credit on Sergio Grieco’s Fermo tutti, arrivo io (Hold Everything, I’m Here, 1953). He next teamed up with the more established screenwriter Ruggero Maccari to write Mario Mattoli’s Due notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with Cleopatra, 1953), which initiated a screenwriting partnership that would see Scola and Maccari work together on more than a dozen films and share the Nastro d’argento for screenwriting four times. At the same time, beginning with Lo scapolo (The Bachelor, 1955), Scola began a close professional relationship with writer-director Antonio Pietrangeli, subsequently writing or cowriting all of Pietrangeli’s major films. He also began to work extensively with Dino Risi, collaborating on the screenplays of Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) and I mostri (The Monsters, 1963) before making his own directorial debut with Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964), a series of mordant comic sketches highlighting the defects of the Italian male, all starring Scola’s favorite actor, Vittorio Gassman. After directing several more satirical comedies in the late 1960s, among them L’arcidiavolo (The Devil in Love, 1966), which saw Gassman teamed up with Mickey Rooney; Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, 1968); and Dramma della gelosia: Tutti i particolari in cronaca (The Pizza Triangle, 1970), which was not only popular in Italy but also nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes, Scola began the 1970s with two more politically engaged films: Permettete? Rocco Papaleo (My Name Is Rocco Papaleo, 1972), shot in the United States and highlighting the dark underside of the American dream, and Trevico-Torino, viaggio nel Fiat-Nam (From Trevico to Turin, 1973), a self-financed quasi-documentary about the exploitation of southern Italian

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migrant workers who had become factory fodder in northern cities like Turin. Scola then returned to comedy to make what many regard as his most accomplished film. Undoubtedly one of the high points of the commedia all’italiana, C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974) traces the trajectory of both the hopes and the disappointments of Italian postwar history through the intersecting and diverging lives of three men and the woman with whom they all at some time fall in love. Ingeniously dovetailing social and political history with cinema history, the film also carries out an affectionate homage to the great achievements of Italian postwar cinema and is dedicated, rather appropriately, to Vittorio De Sica, who also appears briefly in the film as himself. Following Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Down and Dirty, 1976), a funny but merciless portrait of subproletarian life in a shantytown reminiscent of the early films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scola produced what remains his most critically acclaimed film, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977). Bringing Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren together again in a moving story of a chance encounter between a harried housewife and a gay radio journalist on a rather particular day in Fascist Italy, the film was nominated for two Oscars and the Palme d’or at Cannes, in the event winning the César Award in France, a Golden Globe, two David di Donatello awards, and three Nastri d’argento. I nuovi mostri (The New Monsters, 1978), directed collaboratively with Dino Risi and Mario Monicelli and providing an update on the social malaise uncovered in its predecessor 15 years earlier, was followed by La terrazza (The Terrace, 1980), Passione d’amore (Passion of Love, 1981), and Il mondo nuovo (That Night in Varennes, 1982). The charming (and effectively silent) Ballando ballando (also known as Le Bal, 1983) proved to be another critical triumph, receiving an Oscar nomination, the Silver Bear at Berlin, the César in France, and five David di Donatello awards in Italy. Generally unaffected by the crisis that debilitated the Italian film industry in the following years, Scola directed another dozen fine films. Among them La famiglia (The Family, 1987) stands out as a remarkably detailed portrait of an Italian middle-class family seen over a period of three generations, and Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, 2001) for the way in which the director is able to explore the consequences of the 1938 anti-Jewish laws in Italy through their effects on the daily lives of two neighboring shopkeepers. His following Gente di Roma (People of Rome, 2003), written in collaboration with his two daughters, Paola and Silvia Scola, and innovatively shot entirely on digital film, presented an affectionate portrait of Rome and its disparate, and often zany, inhabitants. After completing Che strano chiamarsi Federico (How Strange to Be Named Federico, 2013), an affectionate homage to Fellini that was awarded a special Nastro d’argento, Scola was himself the subject of Ridendo e scherzando—ritratto di un regista all’italiana (Laughing and Joking—Portrait of a Director in the Italian Style,

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2015), a loving retrospective of his life and work directed by his daughters, Paola and Silvia. Following his death in 2016, the much-frequented open-air cinema in Rome’s Villa Borghese was renamed Teatro Ettore Scola in his honor and memory.

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), directed by Ettore Scola. Courtesy of Photofest.

SEGRE, DANIELE (1952–). Photographer, screenwriter, producer, director, and teacher. One of Italy’s most socially committed and independent filmmakers, Segre initiated his filmmaking career as a photographer. In the mid-1970s, he began to make documentaries, the first being a collaboration with Claudio Caligari on Perchè droga (Why Drugs?, 1976). In the following years, having set up his own independent production company, I cammelli, he devoted himself to a cinema that blurred the line between fiction and reality in order to explore and draw attention to a whole range of social problems and marginalities. After shorts such as Ritratto di un piccolo spacciatore (Portrait of a Small-Time Dealer, 1982), he directed his first fulllength feature, Testadura (Hardhead, 1983), which was screened at the Venice Festival. He continued to explore social marginalization in works such as Vite di ballatoio (Balcony Lives, 1984), which highlighted the precarious

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existence of transvestites and transsexuals on the streets of Turin, and in 1989 he established a school to train young people to use video for social purposes. After Partitura per volti e voci (Score for Faces and Voices, 1991), an intimate and layered portrait of workers and union delegates, he produced his second feature film, Manila Paloma Blanca (1992), the chronicle of a difficult encounter between a down-and-out mentally disturbed former actor and a young and wealthy Jewish woman willing to support his attempt to make a comeback. This was followed by Come prima, più di prima, ti amerò (I’ll Love You More Than Ever, 1995), a documentary on HIV-positive sufferers, and A proposito di sentimenti (A Propos Feelings, 1999), dealing with the affective life of Down syndrome sufferers. In 2002, his second feature, Vecchie (Old Women, 2000), provocatively explored the theme of old age through the heated exchanges of two elderly women trapped inside a seaside one-room apartment. Two years later, Mitraglia e il Verme (Machinegun and the Worm, 2004), was a similarly profound exploration of human suffering and endurance, completely set in the lavatories of the vegetable market of a large city. Returning to documentary, Segre continued to engage with generally neglected social issues in Morire di lavoro (Dying of Work, 2008), Sic Fiat Italia (2011), and Sbarre (Prison Bars, 2014), an attempt to give voice to the numerous inmates languishing in Italian prisons, before directing Morituri (Dying, 2015), intended as the third member of the trilogy begun with Vecchie and Mitraglia and presenting its oddly compelling encounter between three middle-aged women—unmarried, divorced, and widowed— completely within the space of the columbarium niches of a cemetery. After being awarded an honorary degree from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 2015, he made his most recent Nome di Battaglia Donna (Battle Name: Woman, 2016), a documentary on the many previously unrecognized women who took part in the Resistance movement. Widely acknowledged as one of the leading Italian practitioners of “a cinema of reality,” in 2012 Segre was honored with the Medal of the President of the Republic as well as receiving the prestigious Maria Adriana Prolo Award from the National Cinema Museum for his entire career. Segre maintains an active website at http://www.danielesegre.it. SERANDREI, MARIO (1907–1966). Critic, screenwriter, and editor. Although working at various times as a journalist, assistant director, supervisor of dubbing, and screenwriter, Serandrei is remembered mostly for his film editing. After a period of writing for Cinematografo, the film journal edited by Alessandro Blasetti, Serandrei came to edit many of Blasetti’s films of the early 1940s, among them La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1942), and Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942). He edited Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione

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in 1943 and, in one of his letters to Visconti at the time, was the first person to use the term neorealism to characterize what he saw as the film’s innovative style. After the war, he continued to work with Visconti on Bellissima (1951), Senso (1954), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra, 1965). In 1945, together with Visconti and Giuseppe De Santis, he codirected and edited Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory), a documentary on the wartime Resistance movement. While collaborating on the screenplay, as well as editing, Mario Bava’s groundbreaking horror film La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960), and continuing to follow Bava through his forays into the other genres with Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961) and La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1962), Serandrei also worked assiduously with Francesco Rosi on all of Rosi’s early films from I magliari (The Magliari, 1959) and Salvatore Giuliano (1961) to Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965). He also edited Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) although the work was eventually completed by Mario Morra. His final edit before his untimely death in 1966 was on “La strega bruciata viva” (“The Witch Burned Alive”), the episode Visconti made for the anthology film Le Streghe (The Witches, 1967). SERENA, GUSTAVO (1881–1970). Actor and director. A Roman marquis with a passion for the stage, Serena approached the silver screen with an extensive background in the theater. Beginning in 1911 with appearances in a number of films for the Film d’Arte Italiana, which specialized in theatrical adaptations, he acted and directed for a number of production houses (Cines, Cinegraph, Pasquali) before joining Caesar Film in Rome in 1915. Here, for the next three years, he acted in and directed many of his best films, frequently in collaboration with diva Francesca Bertini, whom he first directed, and acted with, in the highly acclaimed Assunta Spina (1915). He worked sporadically through the crisis years of the early 1920s, producing, directing, and acting in La perla nera (The Black Pearl, 1922) and La Coscienza (Conscience, 1923) and appeared in, among others, The White Sister, a Metro production starring Lillian Gish and Ronald Colman, filmed in Italy in 1923. In 1927, he assembled a small theatrical company that experimented with staging plays by utilizing a film sequence to set the theatrical scene. In the sound years, he directed Zaganella e il cavaliere (Zaganella and the Honorable Gentleman, 1932), the adaptation of a play by Luigi Capuana, and played one of the leading roles in Naufraghi (Shipwrecked, 1939). In the postwar period, he continued to play small supporting roles in a number of

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unremarkable films; his last appearance was a walk-on part in Don Camillo Monsignore ma non troppo (Don Camillo, Monsignor, 1961), directed by a fellow veteran of the Italian silent era, Carmine Gallone. SERVILLO, TONI (1959–). Stage and screen actor and stage director. One of the most ubiquitous faces on the Italian screen in the new millennium, Servillo was a born actor and had already initiated a successful career on the stage in his native Naples by the mid-1970s. In 1977, he founded his own theater company, the Teatro Studio di Caserta. After having also worked for a brief period with the renowned experimental theater group Falso Movimento, he became one of the founders of the Teatro Uniti and directed and performed in many of the classic plays of the Neapolitan repertoire. His first appearance on the big screen was in a supporting role in Morte di un matematico napolitano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, 1992), directed by a fellow founder of Teatro Uniti, Mario Martone, in his own directorial debut. While continuing to work prolifically on the stage, Servillo appeared in several other films directed by Martone but really began to make his mark on the big screen with his extraordinarily assured performance as the jaded and cynical crooner Tony Pisapia in Paolo Sorrentino’s first feature, L’uomo in più (One Man Up, 2001). Both Servillo and Sorrentino were nominated for David di Donatello awards, with Servillo also nominated for the Nastro d’argento and Sorrentino winning the Silver Ribbon as Best Emerging Director. The film thus initiated a long-lasting partnership that would see Servillo give award-winning performances in Sorrentino’s Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004), the Oscar-nominated Il divo (2008) and La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and netted both director and actor a host of prizes, including Davids and Special Silver Ribbons. At the same time—and indeed while continuing to actively pursue a parallel career on the stage—Servillo provided a chilling performance as Franco, the unscrupulous manager of the toxic waste disposal service, in Matteo Garrone’s groundbreaking crime film Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008) before appearing in a host of other films, including Martone’s Noi credevamo (We Believed, 2010), Daniele Ciprì’s È stato il figlio (It Was the Son, 2012), Roberto Andò’s Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom, 2013) and Le confessioni (The Confessions, 2013), and Donato Carrisi’s La ragazza nella nebbia (The Girl in the Fog, 2017). In 2015, the University of Bologna recognized his significant contribution to Italian performing arts with an honorary degree. Most recently, teaming up again with Sorrentino, Servillo has outdone his caricatured portrayal of Giulio Andreotti in Il divo in offering a remarkably convincing, if grotesque, impersonation of four-time prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (They, 2018).

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A great showman as well as one of the finest actors on the Italian stage and screen of the new millennium, Servillo now has his own informative website at http://www.toniservillo.it. SIMI, CARLO (1924–2000). Costume, set, art, and production designer. After graduating in architecture from the University of Rome, Simi began working in the film industry as a set decorator, originally on a number of genre films mostly directed by Sergio Corbucci. In 1964, under the pseudonym Charles Simons, he designed the sets and costumes for Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) and continued to work (under his own name) with Leone on the latter’s subsequent Westerns, receiving special praise for his production and costume design for C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968). He then abandoned the cinema for several years in order to work as an architect, designing, among other things, the offices of producer Alberto Grimaldi’s Produzioni Europee Associati. He returned to the industry in the mid-1970s, working as art director on Sergio Sollima’s police action thriller Revolver (Blood in the Streets, 1973) and collaborating with comic actor-director Carlo Verdone, for whom he designed the sets and costumes of Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful, 1980) and Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Green, 1981). In 1985, having teamed up once again with Leone, Simi received the Nastro d’argento for his production design for C’era una volta l’America (Once upon a Time in America, 1984). His last contribution to Italian cinema was the art direction for Pupi Avati’s La via degli angeli (A Midsummer Night Dance, 1999). SINDACATO NAZIONALE CRITICI CINEMATOGRAFICI ITALIANI (SNCCI; NATIONAL UNION OF ITALIAN FILM CRITICS). Industry association. Founded in 1971, the SNCCI is the association that brings together film critics in Italy. Partly funded by the Ministry for Culture, it carries out a series of activities aimed at promoting Italian cinema, which include the publication of the prestigious quarterly journal Cinecritica, the organization of a special week of screenings and critical discussion of films during the Venice Festival, and a number of conferences and roundtables held throughout the year in all the major Italian cities. Since 2003, it has maintained a very active and informative website at www.sncci.it. SINDACATO NAZIONALE GIORNALISTI CINEMATOGRAFICI ITALIANI (SNGCI; NATIONAL UNION OF ITALIAN FILM JOURNALISTS). Industry association. Founded in 1946 as an association to represent the interests of journalists and associated writers with a main focus in the cinema, the SNGCI carries out a range of informational and promotional activities, chief of which is the annual award of the prestigious Nastro

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d’argento prizes, recognizing the achievements of all involved in the major areas and categories of the Italian film industry in that particular year. Instituted in the same year as the founding of the association itself, the award ceremony for the various Nastri d’argento has remained one of the highlights of the Italian cinematic calendar. The association now has its own extremely informative website at http://www.cinemagazineweb.it. SOLDATI, MARIO (1906–1999). Writer, director, screenwriter, literary critic, academic, and actor. Generally better known as a writer than a filmmaker, Soldati always claimed to have become involved in cinema merely in order to make money. Nevertheless, he was obviously attracted by the medium and joined the revamped Cines studios during Emilio Cecchi’s period there as artistic director in 1932. He began working as a screenwriter, collaborating on the screenplays of many of Mario Camerini’s best-known films, including Gli uomini che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932), Il cappello a tre punte (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1935), and Il signor Max (Mister Max, 1940), as well as on Alessandro Blasetti’s Contessa di Parma (The Dutchess of Parma, 1937) and Renato Castellani’s debut feature, Un colpo di pistola (A Pistol Shot, 1942). From the late 1930s, he tried his hand at directing, beginning with Dora Nelson (1939), a white telephone comedy set in the film industry itself, which he followed with the two “calligraphic” films for which he would become best known: Piccolo mondo antico (OldFashioned World, 1941) and Malombra (1942), both elegant and atmospheric adaptations of novels by 19th-century writer Antonio Fogazzaro. After the war, while intensifying his literary output, he also continued to direct films, moving effortlessly between stylish literary adaptations like Eugenia Grandet (Eugenie Grandet, 1946) and La provinciale (The Wayward Wife, 1952) to swashbuckling adventure fantasies such as Il sogno di Zorro (Zorro’s Dream, 1952) and Jolanda la figlia del corsaro Nero (Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Pirate, 1953). At the same time, his foray into the crime drama, Fuga in Francia (Flight into France, 1948), in which the desperate attempt by a former ruthless Fascist official to flee to France in order to evade responsibility for his past crimes is stymied by the heroic actions of a former partisan, may also have been something of a gesture of expiation for Soldati’s own short-lived sympathies for Fascism in its early days. After the erotic melodrama La donna del flume (The River Girl, 1955), which showcased both the body and the acting talents of a very young Sophia Loren, Soldati became intensely interested in television and produced a number of travel documentaries for the national broadcaster RAI, including Viaggio nella valle del Po (Travels along the Po Valley, 1957) and Viaggio lungo il Tirreno (Travels along the Tyrrean Coast, 1961), which he made in

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collaboration with Cesare Zavattini. The last fictional feature film he directed, before devoting himself almost completely to writing, was the light ironic comedy Policarpo, “ufficiale di scrittura” (Policarpo, 1959). SOLDINI, SILVIO (1958–). Screenwriter and director. One of the most impressive of the younger filmmakers to emerge in the mid-1980s, Soldini was born in Milan but chose to study film and television at New York University. It was there that he produced his first prize-winning short, Drimage (1982). After returning to Italy, he worked as a translator and assistant director before making the evocative Paesaggio con figure (Figures in a Landscape, 1983) and Giulia in ottobre (Giulia in October, 1984), the latter winning the Jury Prize at the Annecy Italian Film Festival. At the same time, he founded his own production company, Monogatari, and began making documentaries. In 1986, Voci celate (Hidden Voices), a one-hour video filmed in a psychiatric day hospital, won the Salsomaggiore Festival competition. He made several more shorts before directing his first full-length commercial feature, L’aria serena dell’ovest (The Peaceful Air of the West, 1990). A sharply observed portrait of tangentially touching lives in contemporary Milan, the film was nominated for the Golden Leopard at the Festival of Locarno. After several more shorts and documentaries, he directed his second feature, Un’anima divisa in due (A Soul Split in Two, 1993). Presented in competition at the Venice Festival, the film earned Fabrizio Bentivoglio the Volpi Cup for his performance as the young Milanese who falls in love with a gypsy girl. Soldini’s third feature, Le acrobate (The Acrobats, 1997), another social drama about lives that touch each other by chance, won first prize at the Paris Rencontres Internationales de Cinéma. Soldini would score his greatest commercial and critical triumph, however, with Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips, 2001), which achieved record worldwide sales and received nine David di Donatello awards, five Nastri d’Argento, the Flaiano Prize, and three European Academy Award nominations. After Brucio nel vento (Burning in the Wind, 2002), a brooding study of broken lives and an impossible love, Soldini returned to brighter themes with the sparkling comedy Agata e la tempesta (Agatha and the Storm, 2004), nominated for eight David di Donatello awards. Following Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds, 2007), a film about the existential crisis provoked in the mature-aged male protagonist when he suddenly finds himself unemployed, and Cosa voglio di più (Come Undone, 2010), a passionate but ill-fated adulterous love affair between two very different people, Soldini directed the delightful Il comandante e la cicogna (Garibaldi’s Lovers, 2012), a series of intersecting stories of everyday life in Genoa but told as if being critically watched by the civic monuments of the

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city, above them all a haughty equestrian statue of Garibaldi looking down and wondering aloud if it might not have been better to have just remained under Austrian rule. After Per altri occhi (With Other Eyes, 2013), a sensitive exploration of the world of the blind that received the Nastro d’argento for Best Documentary, and another short documentary forming part of Milano 2015, an ensemble film attempting to record the life and character of the city of Milan in the year in which it was hosting the World Expo, Soldini directed his most recent feature, Il colore nascosto delle cose (Emma, 2017), a romantic comedy about a love affair between a blind female osteopath and a philandering advertising executive in which Soldini was able to utilize all the insights he had gained about blindness in his earlier prize-winning documentary. SOLINAS, FRANCO (1927–1982). Screenwriter. Born in Sardinia, Solinas was only a teenager when he participated actively in the Resistance movement during World War II. After the war, he joined the Italian Communist Party and, turning his back on a law degree, began writing. Following minor contributions to films of Luigi Comencini and Mario Camerini, he initiated a fruitful partnership with Gillo Pontecorvo by adapting his own novel, Squarciò, into what would become Pontecorvo’s first feature film, La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957). He subsequently scripted Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960), the moving story of a Jewish girl in the death camp of Treblinka, before collaborating with Francesco Rosi on the screenplay of Salvatore Giuliano (1962). He wrote Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966), a landmark film that won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Solinas’s strong social commitment was responsible for the political dimension of a number of Spaghetti Westerns he helped script in the late 1960s, in particular Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967) and Sergio Corbucci’s Il mercenario (A Professional Gun, 1968). There followed his last collaboration with Pontecorvo, Queimada (Burn!, 1969), a powerful indictment of colonialism that starred Marlon Brando as a professional mercenary deviously working to safeguard British interests in the Caribbean. In the 1970s, Solinas worked with Costa-Gavras on État de siège (State of Siege, 1973), a political thriller that laid bare American interference in Latin American politics, and with Francesco Maselli, for whom he wrote the screenplay of Il sospetto (The Suspect, 1975), another taut political thriller set in Fascist Italy. During this period, he also worked with Joseph Losey, coscripting both The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and Monsieur Kline (Mr. Klein, 1976). Solinas’s last screenplay was for Costa-Gavras’s Hanna K. (1983), a film that dealt with the Jewish–Palestinian question.

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Following Solinas’s untimely death in 1982, an annual prize was instituted in his name to encourage talented young screenwriters and to recognize screenwriters’ generally undervalued contribution to Italian cinema. SOLLIMA, SERGIO (1921–2015). Director, screenwriter, and playwright. Remembered as one of the outstanding genre directors of the immediate postwar period, Sollima graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1941 but, after publishing a history of American cinema in 1947, scored his first artistic successes as a playwright. In 1948, Luigi Squarzina mounted a production of his first play, L’uomo e il fucile (The Man and the Rifle), which won several prizes when performed that year at the international World Youth Festival in Prague, Poland. At the same time, Sollima teamed up with a fellow aspiring filmmaker, Alberto De Martino, to make a series of short documentaries. In the early 1950s, while continuing to write plays, he commenced working as a screenwriter, beginning as a cowriter on Luigi Comencini’s Persiane chiuse (Behind Closed Shutters, 1951) and progressing to the post of regular screenwriter on the peplums of Carlo Campogalliani and Domenico Paolela. In 1962, he made his own directorial debut with “Le donne” (“Women”), an episode of the anthology film L’amore difficile (Sex Can Be Difficult, 1962). After a brief dalliance with the spy genre under the pseudonym Simon Sterling in his Agente 3S3: Passaporto per l’inferno (Agent 3S3: Passport to Hell, 1965), Agente 3S3: Massacro al sole (Agent 3S3: Massacre in the Sun, 1966), and the darker Requiem per un agente segreto (Requiem for a Secret Agent, 1966), he moved to the Spaghetti Western and wrote and directed three of what are widely regarded as classics of the genre, not least for the splendid over-the-top performances by Tomas Milian: La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown, 1966), Faccia a Faccia (Face to Face, 1967), and Corri, uomo, corri (Run Man, Run, 1968). Anticipating the full flourish of the poliziesco that would mark the 1970s, he provided two early exemplars of the genre in Città violenta (Violent City, 1970) and Revolver (Blood on the Streets, 1970), ably exploiting to the fullest the talents of Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, and Oliver Reed. At the same time, he also experimented with the psychological thriller, providing a unique and very compelling version of it in Il diavolo nel cervello (Devil in the Brain, 1972). His greatest triumph, however, would take place on television. In 1974, on commission from the national broadcaster RAI, Sollima set off for Malaysia, Thailand, and India with an international crew to film a six-part miniseries based on two of the popular exotic adventure novels of Emilio Salgari, which featured a young Indian prince turned swashbuckling pirate named Sandokan. Overcoming a host of production and other difficulties that interminably delayed its completion, the much-awaited six one-hour episodes of Sandokan were finally aired on Italian television in January–February 1976. Despite

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being forced to be screened in black and white instead of the vivid color in which it had been filmed, due to an unfortunate delay in the RAI’s scheduled introduction of the new technology, it succeeded in breaking all previous audience records by attracting more than 27 million viewers. Previous filmic adaptations of Salgari’s works had been plentiful, but Sollima’s Sandokan set a new standard, with the actor playing Sandokan, Indian-born Kabir Bedi, becoming a superstar overnight and Sollima himself becoming a celebrity. Given the series’ overwhelming success, Sollima was immediately commissioned to film Il corsaro nero, another of Salgari’s pirate sagas whose protagonist was not Sandokan but, played by Bedi and flanked by many of the actors of the previous series, functioned to all intents and purposes as a sequel. The less than expected box office success of Il corsaro nero (The Black Corsair, 1976) prompted the openly declared sequel, La tigre è ancora viva—Sandokan alla riscossa! (The Tiger Is Still Alive—Sandokan to the Rescue, 1977), which fared somewhat better and contributed to a continuation of the Sandokan myth. From then on, Sollima worked almost exclusively on the small screen. In 1981, he directed the popular three-part miniseries I ragazzi di celluloide (The Celluloid Lads, 1981), which portrayed his own idealistic years at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia during the Fascist period, followed by a reprise of the series, I ragazzi di celluloide 2, in 1984, both seasons starring Massimo Ranieri. In the early 1990s, Sollima retired from filmmaking altogether except for a final attempt at another series on Sandokan, Il figlio di Sandokan: La luce e le tenebre (Son of Sandokan: The Light and the Shadows, 1998), which was filmed on commission for RAI TV, but for a series of bureaucratic reasons was never screened. SOLLIMA, STEFANO (1966–). Cameraman, screenwriter, and director. Son of veteran genre director Sergio Sollima, Stefano Sollima experienced filmmaking from his earliest years as a child on the sets of his father’s films. He initiated his own filmmaking career working as a cameraman for the American CNN, CBS, and NBC networks, often filming and filing live reports from active war zones. After writing and directing a number of witty short films—Grazie (Thanks, 1991), Sotto le unghie (Under the Nails, 1993), and Zippo (2003), the bizarre story of a man whose skin is fitted out with zippers, screened in competition at the Venice Festival—he began working for Italian TV, directing episodes of the long-running RAI soap Un posto al sole (A Place in the Sun), and, among others, the crime-fighting series La squadra (The Team). However, his talents as a supremely competent action director only really came to the fore in 2008 when he was commissioned by pay-television giant Sky Atlantic to supervise and direct Romanzo criminale—la serie (Crime Novel—the Series), a 12-episode series based on the same novel by judge and crime writer Giancarlo De Cataldo, which had

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already been successfully adapted in the award-winning eponymous film directed three years earlier by Michele Placido. The overwhelming commercial and critical success of the first season, hailed in many quarters as a watershed in Italian television, immediately led to Sollima directing a second season in 2010. Following such a resounding success on the small screen, Sollima embarked on his first feature for the big screen, A.C.A.B.—All Cops Are Bastards (2012), a fast-paced, high-octane film adaptation of a book by Carlo Bonino dealing with four members of the riot police squad, a section of the Italian police force with a legendary reputation for brutality. Despite the controversy raised by the less-than-damning portrayal of its protagonists and their violent methods, the film was critically acclaimed, receiving six David di Donatello nominations and winning three Nastro d’argento awards. In the same year, Sollima was hired by Sky Atlantic to supervise and direct Gomorra—la serie, a 12-part series utilizing parts of Roberto Saviano’s best-selling exposé of the Neapolitan criminal underworld that hadn’t already been brought to the big screen in Matteo Garrone’s multiple-award-winning Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008). The first season, produced in association with Cattleya and Fandango, and with several episodes also directed by Francesca Comencini and Claudio Cupellini, screened on the Sky channel in May–June 2014 and outdid the success of Romanzo criminale—la serie by a factor of two, thus becoming Sky’s most watched series ever. The overwhelming success of the series on pay television also prompted an unprecedented theatrical release of the entire series for a four-week season in 200 Italian cinemas and, inevitably, in Sollima being commissioned for a second season. Made on a budget of 16.5 million euros with the same production team, the second season aired on Sky Atlantic in May–June 2016, registering an increase in audience of more than 60 percent. However, while supervising completion of the second season, Sollima took time off from the series in order to direct his second feature for the big screen, Suburra (2015). Adapted from a novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo and Carlo Bonino that claimed to be founded on recent factual revelations, the film was a fast-paced action crime thriller set in a Rome where politics, religion, business, and the criminal underworld continually intersect and ultimately merge. Despite a tepid critical reception, the film did well at the Italian box office but, more significantly, was also picked up by Netflix, which not only screened it globally in 2015 but also decided to finance a 10-part series, the first of its original series in Italian, to appear in 2017. Although originally slated to produce and direct the series, Sollima eventually declined in favor of taking up an offer from America to direct the big-budget sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018). Refusing to be swallowed up by

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the Hollywood machine, Sollima then returned to Italy to begin directing an eight-part series for Sky Italia based on Roberto Saviano’s book about the worldwide traffic in cocaine. The series, ZeroZeroZero, began airing in 2019. Currently the most bankable film and television director in Italy, Sollima has reportedly been approached by, among others, the major video game studio, Activision Blizzard, to direct a mega-budget film based on the popular war game franchise Call of Duty.

Stefano Sollima directing Day of the Soldado (2018). Courtesy of Photofest.

SONEGO, RODOLFO (1921–2000). Screenwriter. One of the most respected screenwriters of postwar Italian cinema, Sonego studied drawing at the Turin Academy of Fine Arts before taking part in the Resistance movement during World War II. Following the war, he moved to Rome, where he wrote and directed a number of documentaries on scientific and art-historical subjects for the Lux Film company. After earning his first screenwriting credit on Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo, paradiso nero (Tombolo, 1947), he worked with Carlo Lizzani on Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!, 1951) and helped write Alberto Lattuada’s Anna (1951) and La spiaggia (Riviera, 1953). Having met actor Alberto Sordi on the set of Franco Rossi’s Il seduttore (The Seducer, 1954), Sonego initiated what would become a lifelong personal and professional relationship that would see him as a regular screenwriter on practically all of the films in which Sordi either acted or directed, thus allowing him an opportunity to modulate Sordi’s characters as time went on so as to present a composite portrait of the changing face of the

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ordinary Italian male. Among the host of films he penned for Sordi were Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959) and Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), directed by Dino Risi; Il vigile (The Traffic Policeman, 1960) and Bello, onesto, emigrato in Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia, 1971), directed by Luigi Zampa; Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A Hero of Our Times, 1955), directed by Mario Monicelli; and, directed by Sordi himself, Un italiano in America (An Italian in America, 1967), In viaggio con papa (Journey with Papa, 1982), Un tassinaro a New York (A Taxi Driver in New York, 1987), and Il comune sensa del pudore (A Common Sense of Modesty, 1976). His numerous other screenwriting credits include collaborations with Mario Camerini on I briganti italiani (The Italian Brigands, 1962), with Tinto Brass on Il disco volante (The Flying Saucer, 1964), and with Vittorio De Sica on Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973). His final film was also his last collaboration with Sordi, a sex comedy directed by Sordi himself, Incontri proibiti (Forbidden Encounters, 1998). SORDI, ALBERTO (1920–2003). Actor and director. Probably the most prolific and certainly one of the most popular actors of the Italian silver screen, Sordi (or Albertone, as he was affectionately known) appeared in close to 150 films in a career that spanned over 60 years. Frustrated by the limited success of his precocious attempts to establish himself on the stage, Sordi moved to the cinema and was appearing in films as an extra in his late teens. A first break came in 1937 when he was chosen to dub the voice of Oliver Hardy in Italian versions of the popular MGM Laurel and Hardy films. He took on minor parts in Fyodor Otsep’s La principessa Tarakanova (Betrayal, 1938) and Carlo Campogalliani’s La notte delle beffe (The Night of Tricks, 1939) before being offered his first significant role as an idealistic young fighter pilot in Mario Mattoli’s war film I tre aquilotti (The Three Pilots, 1942). In the immediate postwar period, he began working again as a dubber of Hollywood films, lending his voice to many first-rank American stars, such as Victor Mature, Robert Mitchum, and Anthony Quinn. He also performed character sketches in stage revues but achieved his first real success on the radio, through his creation of a number of fictional characters who anticipated in many ways those he would play in later films. After appearing in a strong supporting role in Renato Castellani’s Sotto il sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome, 1948), he finally began to make his mark in two of Federico Fellini’s early films, in the title role of Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) and as Alberto, perhaps the most woeful of the five layabouts in I vitelloni (1953), an interpretation that brought him his first Nastro d’argento.

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From this point, his film career really took off in earnest as he furiously set about creating that extensive gallery of fundamentally flawed but amiable characters with whom he would come to be so closely identified. In 1954 alone, he appeared in more than a dozen films, which included Mario Mattoli’s farcical Due notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with Cleopatra, 1954), in which he played the male lead opposite Sophia Loren in one of her first substantial roles, and Steno’s Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome, 1954), in which he gave life to one of the most typical of his early characters, the voluble, if rather misguided and juvenile, Nando Moriconi. In the same year, while acting the title role of Franco Rossi’s Il seduttore (The Seducer, 1954), he met screenwriter Rodolfo Sonego and initiated what would become a lifelong partnership between them, with Sonego subsequently working on the screenplay of practically every film in which Sordi appeared from then on. With more than 60 films already to his credit by the late 1950s, Sordi came to occupy a central position in the development of the commedia all’italiana, contributing with his ever more mature acting style and nuanced character delineation to creating many of the great classics of the genre and giving particularly memorable performances in films such as Dino Risi’s Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961) and Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), for which he received both a Nastro d’argento and a David di Donatello. After appearing in a host of other commedie and as the Italian count, Emilio Ponticelli, in Ken Annakin’s Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Sordi made his own directorial debut with Fumo di Londra (Smoke over London, 1966), a witty comedy of manners set in the London of the swinging ’60s. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he continued to appear in films where the most dramatic subjects were inflected in a comic vein, alternating between playing figures like the deplorable Doctor Tersilli in Luigi Zampa’s satire on greedy doctors abusing the Italian health system in Il medico della mutua (Be Sick . . . It’s Free, 1968) and the hapless husband and father, Giuseppe Di Noi, abruptly imprisoned without recourse in Nanni Loy’s Kafkaesque parable, Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (Why, 1971). Then, after directing himself again in a comic but caustic denunciation of the arms trade in Finché c’è guerra c’è speranza (While There’s War There’s Hope, 1974), Sordi provided what many regard as the most outstanding performance of his entire career playing a meek and mild father who becomes a torturer in avenging the death of his son in Monicelli’s Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977), a tour de force of inspired acting for which he again received both a David and a Nastro d’argento. While he may seldom have reached such an intensity again, he continued to perform brilliantly in a host of subsequent films, whether as the prankster nobleman in Monicelli’s historical costume drama Il Marchese del Grillo

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(Marquis Del Grillo, 1981), or as Arpagon, the great miser, in Tonino Cervi’s adaptation of Molière’s classic L’avaro (The Miser, 1990). In addition to a plethora of prizes he received for his role in specific films, Sordi was awarded three Special Davids for Lifetime Achievement and a posthumous Nastro d’argento for all his work. Underscoring his contribution not only to Italian cinema but to Italian culture generally, in 2002 he was invested with an honorary degree from the University of Salerno. His funeral, held in the Cathedral of San Giovanni in Laterano, was a state funeral in all but name, attended by an estimated 250,000 mourners, led by the president of the Republic and the mayor of Rome. In his memory, the Galleria Colonna in the historic center of Rome was renamed Galleria Alberto Sordi.

Alberto Sordi in I vitelloni (1953), directed by Federico Fellini. Courtesy of Photofest.

SORRENTINO, PAOLO (1970–). Director, screenwriter, and novelist. Widely hailed as one of the most promising young Italian directors of the new millennium, Sorrentino first began to make his mark as a film writer, winning the 1997 Solinas screenwriting prize with his original script Dragoncelli di fuoco (Little Fire Dragons). After collaborating on the screenplay of Antonio Capuano’s Polvere di Napoli (Dust of Naples, 1998), he made the short L’amore non ha confini (Love Has No Limits, 1998) before writing and directing his first full feature, L’uomo in più (One Man Up, 2001). The intriguing story of two men with the same name whose destinies cross by

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chance, the film was screened in competition at the Venice Festival and won wide acclaim, with Sorrentino subsequently being awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. Three years later, his similarly impressive second feature, Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004), was nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes and at home received five David di Donatello awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, as well as three Nastri d’argento. Following a highly praised adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s play Sabato, domenica e lunedì (Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 2005), made for RAI television, and while appearing in a supporting role in Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), Sorrentino wrote and directed L’amico di famiglia (The Family Friend, 2006), the unsettling story of a repulsive but oddly fascinating neighborhood loan shark pursuing the beautiful daughter of one of his victims, which was again nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes. His fourth feature, Il divo (2008), a caricatural but surprisingly accurate portrait of Italian Christian Democrat leader and seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, received the Jury Prize at Cannes, with Sorrentino also winning the Nastro d’argento for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Having now established his reputation as one of the leading Italian directors of the new generation, he wrote and directed his first English-language film, This Must Be the Place (2011), with Sean Penn as a retired rock star who overcomes his existential anomie and achieves catharsis by going on an American road trip to find the SS guard who had tormented his father at Auschwitz. Although puzzling to some, the film was awarded the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at its premiere at Cannes and, in Italy, received six Davids, including for Best Direction and Best Screenplay. Sorrentino then achieved what many believe to be his greatest triumph to date with La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), awarded, over and above the nine David di Donatello and four Nastro d’argento awards, also the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years later, his second English film, Youth (2015), with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two old friends contemplating youth and old age in a health resort in Switzerland, was less successful. However, his international reputation came to be overwhelmingly confirmed with his move to long-form television with The Young Pope, a 10-episode series lavishly financed by American HBO, which was screened in part at Venice to great acclaim before attracting record audiences when broadcast first in Italy and then in the United States in January 2017. Ever daring, a year later he returned to the big screen with the two-part Loro (2018), a sprawling but fascinating portrait of four-time prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the Italy he had helped create. Interestingly, in the last decade, while excelling on the large and small screen, Sorrentino has also revealed a significant talent for literature, publishing a novel, Hanno tutti ragione (Everybody’s Right, 2010), and a collection

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of short stories, Gli aspetti irrilevanti (Irrelevant Aspects, 2016), as well as a number of books derived from his films, including Toni Pagoda e i suoi amici (2012); La giovinezza (Youth, 2016); and Il peso di Dio: Il Vangelo di Lenny Belardo (The Weight of God: The Gospel according to Lenny Belardo, 2017). Even before the long-awaited appearance of his new nine-part HBO series The New Pope, scheduled for autumn 2019, Sorrentino has announced that his next film will be Mob Girl, based on Teresa Carpenter’s book about Mafia informant Arlyne Brickman.

Paolo Sorrentino on the set of Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004). Courtesy of Photofest.

SPAGHETTI WESTERN. See WESTERN ALL’ITALIANA. SPENCER, BUD. See PEDERSOLI, CARLO (1929–2016). SQUITIERI, PASQUALE (1938–2017). Screenwriter, director, actor, and politician. After graduating in law in his native Naples, Squitieri moved to Rome, where he began acting in the theater. Attracted by the lure of cinema, he was soon working as assistant director to Francesco Rosi. He made his directorial debut with Io e Dio (I and God, 1969), a film about a priest in southern Italy in the throes of an existential crisis regarding his celibacy, which he was encouraged to make by Vittorio De Sica, who also acted as producer. There followed two forays into the Western all’italiana under the

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pseudonym William Redford, Django sfida Sartana (Django Defies Sartana, 1970) and La vendetta è un piatto che si serve freddo (Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold, 1971), before Camorra (Gang War in Naples, 1972), the first of a number of films addressing the scourge of organized crime in southern Italy, which included what many still regard as Squitieri’s best film, Il prefetto di ferro (The Iron Prefect, 1977). A heroic portrait of Cesare Mori, the prefect from northern Italy with a reputation for getting things done who was sent to Sicily by Benito Mussolini in 1925 in order to subdue the Mafia, Il prefetto was awarded the David di Donatello for Best Film. Following another film on the Mafia, Corleone (Father of the Godfathers, 1978), Squitieri changed direction to make Claretta (Claretta Petacci, 1984), a film about Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, which starred the actress with whom Squitieri most often worked and had subsequently married, Claudia Cardinale. The film earned Cardinale a Nastro d’argento for her compelling interpretation of the role, but Squitieri was also subjected to criticism for what appeared to many to be a display of Fascist sympathies. Squitieri subsequently worked for a period in television before returning to the big screen with several strongly socially committed films, Gli invisibili (The Invisible Ones, 1988), which adapted a novel by Nanni Balestrini on the theme of left-wing terrorism, and Atto di dolore (Act of Sorrow, 1990), the moving story of a mother struggling to save her son from a heroin addiction. Then, although he had been politically active on the Left in the 1970s, in 1994 Squitieri joined the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale and was elected senator for one term. Failing in his bid for a second term as senator, he returned to filmmaking with Li chiamarono briganti (Brigands, 1999), a celebration of the exploits of the famous Lucanian bandit Carmine Crocco, told in the style of his earlier Spaghetti Westerns. Squitieri’s filmmaking reduced considerably in the new millennium during which he directed L’avvocato de Gregorio (Counselor de Gregorio, 2003), the portrait of an elderly lawyer in straitened circumstances who manages to reassert his sense of dignity by taking a stand for justice, and Father (2011), a film set and shot in America and revolving around the vengeance for a Mafia killing. His final film, L’altro Adamo (The Other Adam, 2014), was a strangely prescient dystopian science fiction thriller set in the near future on an overpopulated earth in which a man uses his artificially intelligent computer to clone himself in order to live in a virtual reality. STENO. See VANZINA, STEFANO (1917–1988). STOPPA, PAOLO (1906–1988). Actor. After studying acting at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, Stoppa made his professional stage debut in 1927 with the Capodaglio-Racca-Olivieri theater company. In the 1930s,

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while becoming better known for his work onstage, he also began to work as a film dubber and to take on small parts in films; his first appearance on the screen was in Gennaro Righelli’s L’armata azzura(The Blue Fleet, 1932). In the postwar period, he continued to pursue a career on both the stage and the screen. Beginning in 1945, he distinguished himself in a host of productions of both classic and contemporary plays, frequently under the direction of Luchino Visconti. At the same time, he took on minor roles in dozens of otherwise unremarkable films before playing one of his first significant parts as Rappi, the turncoat hobo, in Vittorio De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951). He subsequently appeared as Don Peppino, the hysterically distraught widower in the “Pizze a credito” episode of De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954); as Cecchi, the boxing impressario, in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960); and in Roberto Rossellini’s Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi, 1961), in which he played the role of Garibaldi’s hard-nosed general, Nino Bixio. Perhaps his most memorable role, however, was as the upstart mayor and father of the beautiful Angelica in Visconti’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Although often cast in supporting roles, Stoppa appeared in more than 150 films. One of his last interpretations, that of Pope Pius VII in Mario Monicelli’s Il Marchese del Grillo (Marquis Del Grillo, 1981), brought him the third Nastro d’argento of his career. STORARO, VITTORIO (1940–). Cinematographer. Son of a projectionist for the Lux Film studios in Rome, Storaro developed an early passionate interest in photography, which he pursued privately at the Italian Cinematographic Training Center, and then professionally at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, which he was able to enter at the age of only 18. After an apprenticeship that included being assistant cameraman on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964), Storaro graduated to director of photography on Franco Rossi’s Giovinezza, Giovinezza (Youth March, 1969). A year later with La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem) and Il conformista (The Conformist) there began a long partnership that would see Storaro as regular cinematographer on all of Bertolucci’s major films, from Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972) and Novecento (1900, 1976) to The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993). In between, Francis Ford Coppola would lure Storaro to the Philippines to photograph Apocalypse Now (1979), for which Storaro would receive his first Academy Award, an achievement repeated two years later with his work on Warren Beatty’s Reds. He would receive a third Oscar for his work on Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). Considered by many to be the leading cinematographer of his generation—MovieMaker Magazine once called him “the high priest of light”—Storaro has been honored with numerous awards and prizes, including the Lifetime Achievement Award by

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the American Society of Cinematographers (2001) and, in 2005, the Coolidge Award for Cinematography. In 2017, he received the George Eastman Museum’s highest honor, the George Eastman Award.

T TAVIANI, PAOLO (1931–) AND VITTORIO (1929–2018). Directors and screenwriters. In one of the most remarkable partnerships in the history of Italian cinema, brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani always wrote and directed their films together in a harmonious and seamless collaboration that allowed no distinction to be made regarding what each had contributed. According to their own account, the brothers were inspired to become filmmakers during their student days at the University of Pisa when they first went to a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946). They were thus drawn from the very beginning to a socially committed and politically oriented cinema. Their first film, made in 1954 with the help of Cesare Zavattini and Valentino Orsini, was San Miniato, luglio ’44 (San Miniato, July 1944), a documentary that attempted to reconstruct a massacre carried out by the occupying Germans in the church of their native town, San Miniato, during World War II. The film was awarded second prize at the Documentary Festival of Pisa and encouraged the brothers, always in partnership with Orsini, to continue making documentaries for the next five years. The experience culminated in a collaboration with Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens on L’Italia non è un paese povero (Italy Is Not a Poor Country, 1960), a wide-ranging documentary produced for Italian television taking stock of the state of the war-battered nation at the end of the 1950s. Two years later, together with Orsini, they directed their first feature, Un uomo da bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962), a stark and dramatic recounting of the last days of Sicilian union organizer and social activist Salvatore Carnevale before he was brutally murdered by the Mafia. The following year, again with Orsini, the brothers made I fuorilegge del matrimonio (The Marriage Outlaws, 1963), a film that attempted in six separate episodes to dramatize many of the issues relating to the absence of divorce in Italy at that time. Despite the film’s reasonable box office success, the brothers were unable to finance another project until 1967 when, in a climate of growing social unrest, they made I sovversivi (The Subversives, 1967). Shot in cinema verité style, the film explored the profound effect of the death of Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti on the personal lives of a number of fervent 459

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party members. The dark and violent utopian allegory in the Tavianis’ next film, Sotto il segno della scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio, 1969), made in direct response to the explosion of political protest in 1968, confounded the critics when it was first shown at the Venice Festival but confirmed the Tavianis’ status as committed political filmmakers. The brothers continued to explore the tension between aspirations to a political utopia and its apparent impossibility in the two films that followed, San Michele aveva un gallo (Saint Michael Had a Rooster, 1972) and Allonsanfan (1974), both set in the context of failed revolutionary movements of the 19th century. However, it would be the more contemporary and personal struggle for freedom recounted in Padre padrone (1977) that would finally bring the brothers international recognition. Financed by RAI state television and originally shot on 16 mm film, the story of an illiterate Sardinian shepherd struggling to free himself from a tyrannical father fixated in a traditional way of thinking proved to be an overwhelming success at Cannes, where it was championed by no less than Rossellini himself as president of the jury and awarded both the Palme d’or and the International Federation of Film Critics Prize. At home, the film received both a Nastro d’argento and a Special David di Donatello. A cooler critical reception greeted their next film, Il prato (The Meadow, 1979), but the brothers returned to form in what remains perhaps their most accomplished and acclaimed film, La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982). Structured as a bedtime story told by a mother to her infant child, the film revisits the history of the massacre at San Miniato, which had been the subject of the Tavianis’ first documentary but, this time, in the style of an epic and poetic fable. A work of stunning visual beauty, complemented by a stirring musical score by Nicola Piovani, the film was awarded six Davids and two Nastri d’argento at home and both the Ecumenical and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, where it was also nominated for the Palme d’or. This tour de force of filmmaking was followed by the equally impressive Kaos (Chaos, 1984), a masterful retelling of four stories by Luigi Pirandello in the Tavianis’ now characteristic poetic style. Three years later, Good morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon, 1987), the invented story of two Italian brothers trained as art restorers called to work on the set of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), was essentially the Taviani brothers’ own hymn to the art of cinema. While not excluding political themes altogether, from the early 1990s the brothers largely concentrated their efforts on literary adaptations, providing elegant transcriptions of novels by Leo Tolstoy in Il sole anche di notte (Night Sun, 1990), and Resurrezione (Resurrection, 2002), and by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Le affinità elettive (The Elective Affinities, 1996). In the new millennium, they were again able to marry politics and literature in La masseria delle allodole (The Lark Farm, 2007), the adaptation of a prize-

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winning novel by Armenian Italian writer Antonia Arslan recounting the trials and tribulations of two extended families during the Armenian genocide of the First World War. This was followed by Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die, 2012), the engrossing documentation of preparations for a public performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by inmates of Rome’s highest-security prison, and Meraviglioso Boccaccio (Wondrous Boccaccio, 2014), an elegant revisitation of the Decameron, functioning as a paean to the Tavianis’ native Tuscany where most of the stories were set. Their last film together before Vittorio’s death in 2018 was Una questione privata (Rainbow: A Private Affair, 2017), the adaptation of Beppe Fenoglio’s semiautobiographical wartime novel about a young partisan in the Resistance movement torn by contrasting demands between the personal and the political.

Directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani on the set of Il prato (The Meadow, 1979). Courtesy of Photofest.

TERZANO, MASSIMO (1892–1947). Cinematographer. Having begun in the industry as a cameraman in 1913, Terzano graduated to director of photography in the last generation of the Maciste films, most notably Maciste imperatore (Emperor Maciste, 1924) and Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, 1926). With the advent of the sound era, he worked as cinematographer on Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary, 1931) and then on several of Mario Camerini’s most renowned films, including Gli uomini che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932) and Il cappello a tre punte (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1935). One of his greatest

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achievements during this period was his work on Walter Ruttman’s Acciaio (Steel, 1933), much of which was filmed under extreme conditions inside a steel foundry. He subsequently served as director of photography on Carmine Gallone’s Casta diva (1935) and Giuseppe Verdi (The Life of Giuseppe Verdi, 1938). In the early 1940s, he became closely associated with so-called calligraphers such as Mario Soldati, for whom he produced the stunning photography of Malombra (1942) and Le miserie del Signor Travet (His Young Wife, 1945), and Renato Castellani, with whom he worked on Un colpo di pistola (A Pistol Shot, 1942) and Zazà (1944). In the immediate postwar period, he contributed to the ensemble partisan film Giorni di gloria (Days of Glory, 1945) and renewed his collaboration with Camerini as cinematographer for Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945) and L’angelo e il diavolo (Angel and the Devil, 1946) before his promising career was cut short by his untimely death in 1947. TOGNAZZI, RICKY (1955–). Actor and director. Son of veteran actor Ugo Tognazzi, Ricky (born Riccardo) made his first appearance in films at the age of eight, playing his father’s son in one of the episodes of Dino Risi’s I mostri (The Monsters, 1963). He subsequently studied at the DAMS (Faculty of Communication) in Bologna before serving as an assistant on a number of films directed by, among others, Pupi Avati, Luigi Comencini, and Maurizio Ponzi. He also worked as an actor, playing his first significant part as a young nobleman in Ponzi’s Qualcosa di biondo (Aurora by Night, 1984), for which he received the David di Donatello award for best supporting role. After appearing in Ettore Scola’s La famiglia (The Family, 1987), he made his directorial debut with the light social comedy Piccoli equivoci (Little Misunderstandings, 1989), for which he received both the David and the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. He then turned to more socially committed themes with Ultrà (Hooligans, 1991), a powerful portrayal of the disturbing phenomenon of football hooliganism that was awarded both a David and the Silver Bear at Berlin, La scorta (The Bodyguards, 1993), a film about the police escort guarding a magistrate trying unsuccessfully to break the hold of the Sicilian Mafia, and Vite strozzate (Strangled Lives, 1996), a thriller centered on the relatively new social scourge of usury in Italy in the 1990s. After Excellent Cadavers (Falcone, 1999), a portrait of the Mafia-fighting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, made entirely in English for American television, Tognazzi changed direction somewhat with Canone inverso—making love (2000), the adaptation of a Holocaust novel by Paolo Maurensig. After having contributed to Un altro mondo è possibile (Another World Is Possible, 2001), the ensemble film about the protest movement that disrupted the G8 meeting in Genova in 2001, he produced the much-praised Il Papa buono (John XXIII: The Good Pope, 2003), a made-for-television fictional biography of Pope Roncalli, with Eng-

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lish actor Bob Hoskins in the title role. In the same year with his wife, actress and screenwriter Simona Izzo, he codirected Io no (Not Me, 2003), a melodrama about two brothers (played by Ricky himself and his own brother, Gianmarco Tognazzi) who fall out over a woman they both love. He subsequently appeared in a number of television miniseries and played supporting roles in several minor films before returning behind the camera to direct Il padre e lo straniero (The Father and the Foreigner, 2010), a thriller adapted from an early novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo, revolving around a close friendship that develops between two very different men due to both being fathers of disabled children. A year later, Tutta colpa della musica (All the Fault of Music, 2011), the story of an ill-fated mature-age love affair occasioned by the intermediary of an amateur choir, brought Tognazzi a nomination for the Controcampo Italiano Award at the Venice Festival. He has subsequently directed and acted mostly in television series and telemovies although, more recently, has returned to the theater, in 2016 acting in and directing Izzo’s first play, Moglie, mariti, figli:Il maschio superfluo (Wives, Husbands, Children: The Superfluous Male). TOGNAZZI, UGO (1922–1990). Actor. A popular actor who appeared in more than 140 films in a career that spanned four decades, Tognazzi began working in amateur theater in his teens and continued to hone his stage skills by entertaining troops while doing his military service during World War II. After the war, he embarked on a professional career in show business and began touring in numerous vaudeville shows and musical revues. Over the next decade, he became enormously popular with his comic sketches and routines, initially only onstage and on the radio but eventually also on television, where for almost five years he performed regularly with fellow comic actor Raimondo Vianello in the long-running variety program Uno due tre (One Two Three, 1955–1959). During this time, he also appeared on the big screen in a host of lightweight comedies, but his film career only really took off in the early 1960s, due largely to the much more complex characters he was able to create in two films directed by Luciano Salce, Il federale (The Fascist, 1961) and La voglia matta (Crazy Desire, 1962). From then on, usually playing some variation on a cynical, self-serving, womanizing scoundrel, he became one of the fixtures of the Italian screen, starring in films such as Dino Risi’s I mostri (The Monsters, 1963), Antonio Pietrangeli’s Il magnifico cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold, 1964), Alberto Lattuada’s Venga a prendere il caffé da noi (Come Have Coffee with Us, 1970), and Mario Monicelli’s Vogliamo i colonelli (We Want the Colonels, 1973). He contributed significantly in his sardonic supporting role to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (Pigpen, 1969) but undoubtedly provided his most memorable performances in the many films in which he worked with Marco Ferreri, which included L’ape regina (The Conjugal Bed, 1963), La donna scimmia (The

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Ape Woman, 1964), Marcia nuziale (The Wedding March, 1965), L’udienza (Papal Audience, 1972), and La grande abbuffata (The Grande Bouffe, 1973). After playing so many dubious characters, his performance as the morally questionable father willing to exploit his own son’s kidnapping for business reasons in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981) earned him the Palme d’or at Cannes and his fourth Nastro d’argento. Outside of Italy, Tognazzi is probably best remembered as Renato Baldi, the gay character he played in the three Cage aux folles films (1978, 1980, 1985), directed by Édouard Molinaro and Georges Lautner. In the 1960s, Tognazzi had also tried his hand at directing himself in three films, Il mantenuto (His Women, 1961), Il fischio al naso (The Seventh Floor, 1967), and Sissignore (Dismissed on His Wedding Night, 1968). TONTI, ALDO (1910–1988). Cinematographer. Having worked for a number of years as a news photographer, Tonti moved to Cinecittà in the mid1930s, originally employed as a still photographer and cameraman. His first film as director of photography was Flavio Calzavara’s Piccoli naufraghi (The Little Adventures, 1938), followed by several films directed by Goffredo Alessandrini including Abuna Messias (Cardinal Messias, 1939), Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto (Caravaggio, 1941), and Nozze di Sangue (Blood Wedding, 1941). After working with Augusto Genina on Bengasi (1942), Tonti collaborated with fellow cinematographer Domenico Scala to create the novel visual style of Luchino Visconti’s landmark Ossessione (1943). In the immediate postwar period, Tonti worked on Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946) and Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946), Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1948), and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1948). Having photographed “Il miracolo” (The Miracle), the second episode of Roberto Rossellini’s L’amore (1948), he returned to work with Rossellini on Europa ’51 (The Greatest Love, 1952), Dov’e la libertà (Where Is Freedom?, 1954), and India: Matri Bhumi (India, 1959), while also serving as cinematographer on Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957). In the 1960s, he filmed Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960) and Marco Ferreri’s La donna scimia (The Ape Woman, 1964) before also being the cinematographer for John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). With more than 120 films to his credit, Tonti retired from the industry after photographing the big-budget action adventure Ashanti (1979), directed by Richard Fleisher.

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TORNATORE, GIUSEPPE (1956–). Photographer, screenwriter, and director. Later to become one of the leading names of the so-called New Italian Cinema, Tornatore began his career as a still photographer and a documentary filmmaker in his native Sicily. After moving to Rome and producing a number of television documentaries for the national broadcaster RAI, he collaborated on the script and served as second unit director for Giuseppe Ferrara’s Cento giorni a Palermo (A Hundred Days in Palermo, 1984), a film about General Dalla Chiesa’s ill-fated posting to Sicily in order to break the power of the Mafia. His own directorial debut came two years later with another film on the Mafia, Il camorrista (The Professor, 1986), which brought him the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. He would, however, achieve both national and international renown with Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), a nostalgic and loving celebration of the golden days of cinema that won, among many others, the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, an Italian Golden Globe, and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. His next film, Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine, 1990), was a less celebratory look at the social degradation occurring in Italy in the late 1980s, but it was followed by the more whimsical “Il cane blu” (“The Blue Dog”), one segment of the four-episode film La domenica specialmente (Especially on Sunday, 1991). Una pura formalità (A Pure Formality, 1994), something of a metaphysical whodunit located almost entirely in one dark, rain-sodden room over a single night, and starring Roman Polanski, Gerard Depardieu and Sergio Rubini, was followed by L’uomo dalle stelle (The Star Maker, 1995), another film that revolved around the lure of cinema. La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, 1998), a big budget adaptation of a theatrical monologue by Alessandro Baricco then followed, attracting a host of prizes including six David di Donatello awards and a special Nastro d’argento for Ennio Morricone’s score. Tornatore returned to the Sicily of his childhood again with Malena (2000), an erotic coming-of-age saga set during World War II and featuring the stunning looks of Monica Bellucci. Putting apparently well-advanced plans for a major film on the Battle of Stalingrad on hold due to lack of finances, Tornatore subsequently wrote and directed La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 2006), a mystery thriller set in the northern city of Trieste and centered on a dark secret in the past of a Ukrainian immigrant. Two years later with Baarìa (2009), a sweeping historical epic depicting life in Tornatore’s native town of Bagheria over a period of 50 years and spanning three generations, Tornatore attempted to again return to his Sicilian roots and to his own childhood. A big-budget production, bristling with energy and color, the film received the Nastro d’argento as Film of the Year and was in line to be proposed as Italy’s candidate for the Academy Award that year but, in the event, did not succeed in making it past the short list. Tornatore then returned to documentary, making L’ultimo gattopardo: Ritratto di Goffredo Lombardo (2010), a historic portrait of the

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founder of the Titanus studios, before La migliore offerta (The Best Offer, 2013), a clever thriller made completely in English and set in the ruthless world of the art and antiques market. Most recently, he has directed La corrispondenza (Correspondence, 2016), the story of a epistolary love affair carried out almost completely through digital media.

Giuseppe Tornatore directing Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988). Courtesy of Photofest.

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TORRE, ROBERTA (1962–). Photographer, visual artist, screenwriter, and stage and screen director. Having grown up with a grandfather who was an avid photographer and keen home-movie maker, Torre studied philosophy at the University of Milan. Resolved to become a filmmaker, she subsequently attended the Milan Civic Film School and the Paolo Grassi Academy of Dramatic Arts, following which she also frequented Ermanno Olmi’s cooperative film school, Ipotesi Cinema. A chance visit to Palermo ignited a fascination with the city, leading to moving there in 1990 and immediately creating the “Anonimi e Indipendenti,” a small, independent production company with which she began to make short films and documentaries. In 1994, her Le anime corte (Short Souls, 1994) was screened at the Torino Film Festival where it won the City of Turin Prize for a nonfiction film. However, it was her first fictional feature, Tano da morire (To Die for Tano, 1997), which really brought her to national notice. An unprecedented witty, colorful, and slightly surreal song-and-dance musical about the Mafia, made largely using nonprofessional actors, the film was a minor sensation and earned Torre the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub), Kodak, and De Laurentiis awards at the Venice Festival as well as the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento awards for Best Emerging Director. Two years later, her second feature, Sud Side Stori (South Side Story, 2000), was similarly iconoclastic in engaging with the serious issue of African immigration to Italy in a hilariously surreal multiracial musical that playfully referenced both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Although made in a much more conventional realistic style, her third feature, Angela (2002), also broke new ground in being one of the first films to portray women actively operating in the Sicilian Mafia. Four years later, following Torre’s relocation to Rome, Mare nero (The Dark Sea, 2006), was a dark and disturbing 21st-century noir in which a police inspector investigating the murder of a young woman comes to be drawn ever deeper into the hidden and dangerous world of Rome’s Swinging subculture. In the wake of the film’s only tepid reception, in 2007 Torre founded Rosettafilm, a new company with which she made several documentaries about Rome, including Itiburtino Terzo (2009) and La notte quando è morto Pasolini (The Night Pasolini Died, 2008), in which she conducted a revealing interview with Pino Pelosi, who at this time had been released from prison after having served his sentence for the 1975 murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Two years later, she returned to feature filmmaking, and to Sicily, with I baci mai dati (Kisses Never Given, 2010), the charming story of a 13year-old girl who knowingly makes up an encounter with the Virgin Mary (which she claims has conferred a miraculous power on her), only to discover, in the end, that she has really worked something of a miracle. The film received the Brian Award at Venice as well as being put forward to compete for the Grand Jury Prize at the American Sundance Festival.

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At this point, with always a number of strings to her bow, Torre turned to theater and directed, among others, productions of Annibale Ruccello’s La ciociara (2011), Aristophanes’s The Birds (2012), and an extraordinary punk version of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (2014) set, in her own words, in “a circus of the afterlife.” At the same time, she published her third novel, Il colore è una variabile dell’infinito (Color Is a Variable of the Infinite, 2014), in which she reconstructed the life and exploits of her illustrious grandfather, Pierluigi Torre, an aeronautical engineer and inventor responsible for, among other things, the design of the Lambretta scooter. In 2017, Torre returned to the musical in her most recent Riccardo va all’inferno (Bloody Richard), a stunning reworking of Shakespeare’s Richard III in a surreal fantasy style reminiscent of her early films. Torre now maintains her own engaging website at http:// www.robertatorre.com. TOSI, PIERO (1927–2019). Costume designer. Widely regarded as Italy’s leading film costume designer, Tosi first made his mark by dressing Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951). He went on to design the costumes for all of Visconti’s subsequent films, including Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and all the elegant period costumes of Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), for which he received his first nomination for an Academy Award. Much in demand, he was called to work with all the other major Italian directors, including Vittorio De Sica, for whom he designed the costumes of Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), and Mauro Bolognini, with whom he collaborated on a host of films, from the early Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960) to La storia vera della signora delle camelie (Lady of the Camelias, 1981). An extremely imaginative and versatile artist whose designs were always founded on meticulous research, Tosi was also responsible for the makeup and hairstyles of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969) as well as the overall production design of “Toby Dammit,” Fellini’s contribution to the compilation film Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead, 1968). In the 1980s, he worked most often with Franco Zeffirelli, his designs for Zeffirelli’s production of La traviata (1982) earning him his fifth Oscar nomination. After collaborating one last time with Zeffirelli on Storia di una capinera (Sparrow, 1993), Tosi officially retired from the film industry to continue teaching costume design at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Ten years later, he was drawn back into the industry briefly in order to help design the costumes for Gianni Amelio’s Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House, 2004) and supervise the costumes for Emidio Greco’s L’uomo privato (The Private Man, 2007). In 2014, he was awarded an honorary Oscar as “a visionary whose incomparable costume designs shaped timeless, living art in motion pictures.”

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TOTÒ (1898–1967). Actor and writer. Antonio De Curtis, known from his earliest years simply as Totò, was undoubtedly the most popular and prolific comic actor in the history of Italian cinema. As well as performing in innumerable stage shows and theatrical reviews, he appeared in more than 100 films and, at the time of his death, had achieved such popularity as to have become a household name and a national legend. Born illegitimately in one of the poorer quarters of Naples and baptized under his mother’s maiden name of Clemente, he achieved both respectability and nobility when his father, the Marquis Giuseppe De Curtis, finally married his mother in 1921 and, several years later, officially acknowledged paternity. By another quirk of fate, in 1933 he was also legally adopted by the Marquis Francesco Maria Gagliardi Focas, all of which served to invest him with a long series of aristocratic titles that he always displayed with great pride. Ironically, while on the stage or screen he regularly played lower-class characters who were invariably poor and often starving, on the set or in the dressing room he was reputed to have a distinct preference for being addressed as “Principe” (“Highness”). After serving as a volunteer in the army during World War I, Totò returned to Naples and began performing as an amateur, doing comic sketches and commedia dell’arte in many of the city’s smaller theaters. In 1922, he moved to Rome, where, in what would become his trademark stage costume of bowler hat, frock coat, baggy pants, and flat shoes, he made a triumphal professional acting debut at the Teatro Umberto I. From then onward, his reputation continued to grow as he appeared with many of the major theatrical companies of the day in prestigious theaters throughout Italy. By 1932, he had formed his own company and achieved huge popularity touring the country with a variety of vaudeville shows and musical revues. Thus, by the mid-1930s, he had become the most renowned stage comedian in all of Italy when he was recruited to the cinema by veteran film producer Gustavo Lombardo. Despite the reputation he had built up on the stage, however, his first two films, Fermo con le mani (Hands Off Me!, 1937) and Animali pazzi (Mad Animals, 1939), failed to impress, both seen by the waiting critics as little more than a stringing together of disparate comic sketches. His third film, San Giovanni decollato (St. John, the Beheaded, 1940), directed by Amleto Palermi from a well-known play by Neapolitan writer and director Nino Martoglio, displayed greater narrative coherence and depth of character and was considerably better received. Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that Totò’s film career only really came into its own in the immediate postwar period when the unexpected but overwhelming box office success of Mario Mattoli’s I due orfanelli (The Two Orphans, 1947) initiated a frenetic pro-

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duction schedule for the next decade and a half that saw him appear in up to seven films a year, allowing Il comandante (The Commandant), made in 1963, to be billed as the comedian’s 100th film. It is undeniable that many of these were flimsy farces that, like I due orfanelli itself, utilized a thin narrative thread to hold together what was basically a series of inspired comic sketches and witty repartee, and some were also clearly hastily thrown together parodies of other films that had achieved their own success, such as Totò le mokò (1949), Totò Tarzan (1949), Totò, Peppino e La dolce vita (Totò, Peppino and La dolce vita, 1961), and Che fine ha fatto Totò Baby? (What Ever Happened to Baby Totò?, 1964). Yet a number also engaged, albeit always in a comic vein, with some of the most pressing social problems of the day, as with the issue of the shortage of housing that was strongly foregrounded in films such as Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949) and Arrangiatevi! (You’re on Your Own, 1959). But what was present in all the films, especially the ones that featured his name in the title, such as Totò cerca moglie (Totò Looks for a Wife, 1950), Totò a colori (Toto in Color, 1952), Totò all’inferno (Totò in Hell, 1955) and Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina (Toto, Peppino, and the Hussy, 1956), was an exceptional comic bravura that united the most extraordinary physical ability to use the body like a marionette with a verbal dexterity and linguistic inventiveness that frequently bordered on performance poetry. Indeed, certain invented phrases and verbal exchanges from the films entered the language and became common currency. Yet despite their immense popularity and undeniable box office success, Totò’s films continued to be generally dismissed by contemporary “serious” film critics, and the only critical recognition he received for the greater part of his career was the Nastro d’argento for his role in Steno and Mario Monicelli’s Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951). Then, only a year before his death, his inspired performance in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) was recognized with a special mention at Cannes and a second Nastro d’argento. In the years following his death, especially when his films came to be frequently shown on national television and later available on videocassettes, his comic artistry came to be universally acknowledged. In 1995, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of cinema, a postage stamp of Totò was issued to honor his place in Italian popular culture. TRINCA, JASMINE (1981–). Actress. Still only a high school student nurturing ambitions of becoming an archaeologist, Trinca was selected by Nanni Moretti to play the part of Irene, the teenage daughter, in Moretti’s La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001). Her very strong performance in the film was recognized with Best Supporting Actress nominations for the Nastro d’argento and the David di Donatello, as well as the prestigious Gu-

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glielmo Biraghi Award. Still uncertain whether to quit her studies for a career in the cinema, she nevertheless undertook the more difficult role of the mentally unbalanced young Giorgia in Marco Tullio Giordana’s La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which she received a second David nomination in a supporting role but also a shared Silver Ribbon for Best Actress. She consequently definitively abandoned her studies and embarked on what has already become a stellar film career. She appeared, again as a teenager, in the first story of Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’amore (The Manual of Love, 2005) and then, in the slightly older role of the partner of “Il Freddo” in Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel, 2005). Soon after she worked again with Moretti, as the aspiring screenwriter-director hoping to make a film on Silvio Berlusconi, in Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), a role that earned her another Best Supporting Actress nomination for the David, before playing the young Catholic university student joining the 1968 movement in Placido’s Il grande sogno (The Big Dream, 2009). At the same time, with her reputation beginning to spread beyond national borders, she appeared in Alain Tasma’s Israeli-French coproduction Ultimatum (2009), as the female half of a young expatriate French couple living in Jerusalem whose relationship is severely tried when the missiles begin to fly in the Persian Gulf War. Already regarded as one of the most promising actresses of her generation, she subsequently blossomed as she took on a number of more challenging roles: as Augusta, the young woman who, after a personal tragedy, journeys to the jungles of the Amazon in order to find herself in Giorgio Diritti’s Un giorno devi andare (There Will Come a Day, 2013), a stunning performance that earned her a fourth nomination for the David and the award of the Nastro d’argento as Best Actress; as Irene, the protagonist of Valeria Golino’s directorial debut, Miele (Honey, 2013), plying the ambivalent trade of assisting terminally ill patients to carry out euthanasia; and, more recently, as a separated single mother struggling to support herself and defend her daughter from the clutches of her violent ex-partner, in Sergio Castellito’s Fortunata (Lucky, 2017), a most impressive performance that earned her not only her fourth Silver Ribbon in Italy but also the Best Actress accolade in the Un certain regard section of the Cannes Festival. Clearly still keen to embrace more difficult roles, she has recently played the sister of Stefano Cucchi, a young sometime drug user who, in 2009, died in suspicious circumstances while in police custody, in Alessio Cremonini’s Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi, 2018).

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Jasmine Trinca and Vinicio Marchioni in Valeria Golino’s Miele (Honey, 2013). Courtesy of Photofest.

TROISI, MASSIMO (1953–1994). Actor, screenwriter, and director. One of the most genial and popular actor-directors of the so-called New Italian Cinema, Troisi came to film after many years of cabaret and amateur theater. He began his brief career in the late 1960s performing stand-up comedy and cabaret in Naples with the group La smorfia (The Grimace), eventually gaining a national notoriety via appearances on television programs such as Nonstop (1976) and Luna Park (1979). Deciding to branch out on his own, in 1981 he wrote, directed, and acted in his first feature film, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three, 1981), which earned him the immediate recognition of two David di Donatello awards, including for Best Film, and three Nastri d’argento. He subsequently wrote and directed himself in Scusate il ritardo (Sorry I’m Late, 1982) before pairing up with Roberto Benigni to codirect and act in the hilarious time-traveling road movie through Italian history, Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry, 1985). After acting in Cinzia Th. Torrini’s Hotel Colonial (1987), he directed himself again in Le vie del signore sono finite (The Ways of the Lord Have Ended, 1987) before appearing in Ettore Scola’s Splendor (1988); Che ora è (What Time Is It? 1989), for which he shared the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Festival with Marcello Mastroianni; and Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (The Voyage of Captain Fracassa, 1990). He directed himself again in Pensavo fosse amore, invece era un calesse (I Thought It Was Love, 1991) before making his last appearance, when already quite ill with a congenital

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heart ailment, in Michael Radford’s Il postino (The Postman, 1994), for which he received a posthumous Oscar nomination. His tragic early death was widely mourned by many who thought he was just reaching his artistic maturity. TROVAJOLI, ARMANDO (1917–2013). Musician and composer. After learning to play the violin at home as a child, Trovajoli graduated in piano from the Conservatory of Saint Cecilia in Rome before undertaking further studies in composition under Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. He was, however, most attracted to jazz and, by the age of 20, was playing with some of the best Italian jazz ensembles of the period. After the war, he continued his career as a jazz pianist and had occasion to perform with such internationally renowned musicians as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Django Reinhardt. In the early 1950s, he began an extensive series of recordings while, at the same time, working with Piero Piccioni presenting regular jazz programs on national radio. Although already introduced to composing for film by Lavagnino himself, Trovajoli’s first real foray into music for cinema was the song “El Negro Zumbón,” sung by Silvana Mangano in Alberto Lattuada’s Anna (1951), which subsequently became a huge international hit when released as a single. From this point on, Trovajoli’s busy career alternated between performing and directing music himself, writing highly popular musical revues such as the legendary Rugantino (1962), and composing the soundtrack of literally hundreds of films. He worked at various times with practically all the major directors (with the notable exception of Federico Fellini), including Vittorio De Sica, for whom he scored La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), and Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), and Giuseppe De Santis, with whom he collaborated on the war epic Italiani brava gente (Attack and Retreat, 1964). He established an especially close relationship with Dino Risi, for whom he scored more than 30 films, and with Ettore Scola, contributing the music to all of Scola’s films and winning the Nastro d’argento for Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977) and La famiglia (The Family, 1987), as well as the David di Donatello for Ballando ballando (also known as Le Bal, 1983). At the same time, he also embraced all the popular genres, writing the music for everything from Totò and peplum films to horror and Spaghetti Westerns. With more than 200 film and TV musical scores to his credit, Trovajoli was one of Italy’s most acclaimed film composers. His international popularity was underscored by Quentin Tarantino’s decision to incorporate a section of Trovajoli’s score for the Spaghetti Western I lunghi giorni della vendetta (Long Days of Vengeance, 1966) in his Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). His last

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score, perhaps rather appropriately at the age of 93, was for Carlo Vanzina’s comedy, La vita è una cosa meravigliosa (Life Is Something Marvelous, 2010).

U UMILIANI, PIERO (1926–2001). Musician, conductor, arranger, and film composer. A passionate jazz enthusiast from his earliest years, Umiliani nevertheless graduated in law before going on to study at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence, where he majored in fugue and counterpoint. In 1952, he moved from his native Florence to Rome, where he worked as an arranger for Armando Trovajoli and soon thereafter recorded his first album for RCA, Dixieland in Naples. In 1955, he was hired by the RAI studios as resident pianist, conductor, and arranger. His first composition for film was the groundbreaking jazz score he provided for Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), on which he featured the legendary American trumpeter Chet Baker. He subsequently worked with many of the major Italian directors and across all the popular film genres, from the commedia all’italiana and spy films to Western all’italiana and the giallo. One of his most highly regarded film scores was the orchestral jazz soundtrack he produced for Siro Marcellini’s crime thriller La legge dei gangsters (Gangsters’ Law, 1969). At the other end of the scale, his simple but catchy “Mahna Mahna” theme, originally written for the mondo-style documentary Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden Heaven and Hell, 1968), received a new lease on life when performed on television by the Muppets in 1977 and has been revived in countless versions ever since. After penning the music for some 150 feature films, documentaries, and television programs, in the early 1980s Umiliani suffered a severe brain hemorrhage and only recovered the ability to play music a few years before his death. He now has an official dedicated website at http://www.umiliani.eu/piero_umiliani.html. UNIONE CINEMATOGRAFICA ITALIANA (UCI; ITALIAN CINEMATOGRAPHIC UNION). In January 1919, in response to the declining fortunes of the film industry at home and increased competition from abroad, 11 of the major Italian studios, together with their actors, directors, and financial underwriters, united under the leadership of Baron Alberto Fassini, formerly head of the Cines, to create the Unione Cinematografica Italiana. 475

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While the consortium initially had some success in increasing production, poor management practices and disagreements between a number of the major players prevented it from functioning effectively from the very start. By February 1920, Baron Fassini had left to join the board of an Italian American shipping line. Then in 1921, with productions proliferating, costs soaring, and box office earnings continuing to fall, the collapse of one of the trust’s principal backers, the Banca Italiana di Sconto, dealt it a mortal blow. Recklessly, however, more large-scale productions were financed and executed, but most failed dismally at the box office. Furthermore, the trust’s poor distribution network meant that many of the films that were produced were not properly exhibited and, in many cases, never released. With an expensive remake of Quo vadis? still in production in 1923, the consortium was declared legally bankrupt, although it was not officially wound up until 1926 when all its assets were liquidated, most being bought up by the enterprising Stefano Pittaluga. The fall of the UCI effectively marked the end of the Italian film industry, which, only a decade earlier, had experienced a veritable golden age. It would be Pittaluga’s entrepreneurial skills and great foresight that would eventually create the conditions for its revival in the coming sound era.

V VALERI, FRANCA (1920–2020). Actress and playwright. One of Italy’s most celebrated comediennes, Franca Valeri (born Franca Maria Norsa in Milan) came to popular notice in the late 1940s for her comic characterizations on the radio, achieving particular notoriety for her impersonation of the snobbish and opinionated young northerner, signorina Cesira (Miss Cesira). Her characters soon migrated to the stage as part of the Teatro dei Gobbi, which Valeri helped to found and with which she toured Europe, and for the next two decades she also reappeared in various guises on many of the most watched television comedy and variety shows. From the early 1950s, she also began to appear in films, making her debut as a Hungarian choreographer in Federico Fellini’s Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950) and continuing as the rich and spoiled Giulia Sofia in Totò a colori (Toto in Color, 1952); as Lady Eva, the pseudo-aristocratic heart-toheart columnist in Steno’s Piccola posta (1955); and as the plainer cousin of Sophia Loren in Dino Risi’s Il segno di Venere (The Sign of Venus, 1955), which she also helped write. One of her most memorable incarnations from this period was as the shrewish wife and nemesis of Alberto Sordi in Risi’s Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959). Although she continued to appear in films in the following years, most frequently in supporting roles but also starring at times, as in several comedies directed by her husband, Vittorio Caprioli, her first love remained the theater, and from the mid-1980s she worked mostly on stage, frequently writing and acting in her own plays. She returned to television in the mid1990s as a regular in a number of popular situation comedies and miniseries such as Norma e Felice (1995), Caro maestro (Dear Teacher, 1996), and Linda e il brigadiere (Linda and the Sergeant, 1999). In 2003, while continuing to perform a number of her own plays on stage, she also returned to the big screen in an adaptation of her play Tosca e altre due (Tosca and the Women, 2003), an amusing and ironic take on Giacomo Puccini’s wellknown opera, directed by Giorgio Ferrara.

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Indefatigably active into her 90s, in 2010 she released her autobiography, Bugiarda no, reticente (No Liar, Reticent), and, a year later, published a much acclaimed theatrical piece, Non tutto è risolto (Not Everything Is Resolved), soon after playing the lead role in its premiere at the Teatro Valle in Rome. In the same year, she was awarded an honorary degree in the dramatic arts from the University of Milan and nominated Knight of the Great Cross by Italian president Giorgio Napolitano. In 2016, she published a volume of memories, anecdotes, and disquisitions on old age with the playful title La vacanza dei superstiti (The Vacation of the Survivors, 2016). Still being acclaimed as one of the grand ladies of Italian stage and screen, Valeri passed away quietly in her sleep a few days after having celebrated her 100th birthday. VALLI, ALIDA (1921–2006). Actress. Born Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger in Pola (then Istria, now part of Croatia), Valli moved to Rome in 1935 to become one of the first students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. She abandoned the Centro after only a year in order to take a small part in Enrico Guazzoni’s I due sergenti (The Two Sergeants, 1936) and then a more substantial role in Mario Bonnard’s Il feroce saladino (The Ferocious Saladin, 1937), for which she first assumed the stage name of Alida Valli. In the following years, she gained wide popularity playing the young innocent in a number of the so-called white telephone films and, by the end of the 1930s, had achieved star status. Her reputation as a serious actress was then consolidated by her moving interpretation of Luisa in Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Old-Fashioned World, 1941), for which she received the Best Actress award at the Venice Festival, and her stirring performance as Kira in Goffredo Alessandrini’s adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). Immediately after the war, Valli appeared in Mario Mattoli’s La vita ricomincia (Life Begins Anew, 1945) and was again chosen by Soldati to play the lead in Eugenia Grandet (Eugenie Grandet, 1947), a performance that brought her a Nastro d’argento and also to the attention of David O. Selznick, who lured her to Hollywood to play opposite Gregory Peck in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947). After again playing the female lead opposite Fred MacMurray and a very young Frank Sinatra in Irving Pichel’s The Miracle of the Bells (1948), she was called to England to play Anna Schmidt in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Having returned to Europe in the early 1950s, she made a number of minor films, both in Italy and in France, before providing one of the best performances of her career as Countess Livia Serpieri in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954). She was subsequently the protagonist’s wife, Rosetta, in Gillo Pontecorvo’s debut film, La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957); Irma in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il grido (The

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Outcry, 1957); Queen Merope in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967); and then Draifa, the enigmatic former mistress of the protagonist’s father, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970). In the following years, while continuing to work with art house auteurs like Valerio Zurlini—she was Vanina’s mother in La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer, 1972)—and with Bertolucci again in Novecento (1900, 1976) and La luna (Luna, 1979), she also took on cameo roles in a number of B-grade horror thrillers such as Mario Bava’s Lisa e il diavolo (Lisa and the Devil, 1973), Pierre Grunstein’s Tendre Dracula (The Big Scare, 1974), and Giulio Berruti’s Suor omicidi (Killer Nun, 1979). She is particularly remembered by horror buffs for her part as Miss Tanner in Dario Argento’s horror classic Suspiria (1977). From the mid-1950s onward, she alternated between film and theater and often appeared on television, both in Italy and abroad. After hosting the television music show Music Rama (1966), she also tried her hand at producing and codirecting the documentary L’amore in tutte le sue espressioni (Love in All Its Manifestations, 1968). She continued to work throughout the 1980s and 1990s, although mostly in supporting roles, earning a David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actress in Marco Tullio Giordana’s La caduta degli angeli ribelli (The Fall of the Rebellious Angels, 1981), and a year later the Italian theater critics’ Ennio Flaiano Award for her performance onstage in the Renaissance comedy La Venexiana. After a host of other prizes and recognitions, including the honorific title of Cavaliere della Repubblica, she was awarded a David di Donatello for her career achievements in 1991 and, in 1997, a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival for her contribution to world cinema.

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Alida Valli and Farley Granger in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954). Courtesy of Photofest.

VALLONE, RAF (1916–2002). Actor. Endowed with handsome good looks and a strong athletic build, Raffaele (shortened to Raf) Vallone was one of the leading male actors of the postwar period. Having tried unsuccessfully to pursue a career as a professional soccer player, Vallone studied law and literature at the University of Turin, graduating in both. Before joining the ranks of the Resistance movement, he landed a small walk-on role in Goffredo Alessandrini’s Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). After the war, he worked as a sports reporter and cultural writer for the Communist daily L’Unità before playing a strong supporting role in Giuseppe De Santis’s runaway commercial success Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). His acting career was assured as he was called to play the lead roles in De Santis’s Non c’è pace fra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950), Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950), and Curzio Malaparte’s Il Cristo proibito (The Forbidden Christ, 1951). Alberto Lattuada gave him the very sympathetic role of Andrea in Anna (1951), after which he played Giuseppe Garibaldi in Alessandrini’s historical drama Camicie Rosse (Anita Garibaldi, 1952). Having by now begun to acquire an international reputation, he was called to France to play the male lead opposite Simone Signoret in Marcel Carné’s Thérèse Raquin (The Adultress, 1953), following

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which Lattuada provided him with more positive roles as the progressive Communist mayor in La spiaggia (Riviera, 1954) and the father in Guendalina (1957). In the late 1950s, he extended himself further by taking to the stage, receiving particular acclaim for his portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Peter Brook’s Parisian production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, a role that he reprised in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 screen adaptation of the play. After playing Sophia Loren’s sometime lover in Vittorio De Sica’s La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), he was lured to Hollywood, where he gave many creditable performances including that of Count Ordonez in Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961) and Cardinal Quarenghi in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), the first of many clerics he would play from then on. He subsequently appeared in a wide variety of films, from political thrillers such as John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter (1970) and Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975) to B-grade horror films like William M. Rose’s The Girl in Room 2a (1973). At the same time, he worked extensively for Italian television in miniseries such as Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1971) and Marco Visconti (1975), and in American telefilms such as Honor Thy Father (1973), in which he played New York gangster Joe Bonanno. Fittingly, perhaps, one of his last on-screen roles was the part of the honest Cardinal Lamberto in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III (1990). In 2001, Vallone recounted his long and interesting career in his autobiography, Alfabeto della memoria (An Alphabet of Memory). VANCINI, FLORESTANO (1926–2008). Director and screenwriter. Beginning in 1949, Vancini directed some 40 documentaries and worked as assistant director to Mario Soldati and Valerio Zurlini before making an impressive directorial debut in 1960 with La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43). Adapted from a novel by Giorgio Bassani that recounted the events surrounding a massacre by the Fascists in Ferrara during World War II, La lunga notte was awarded the prize for Best First Film at the Venice Festival. Then, following the crime drama La banda Casaroli (The Casaroli Gang, 1963) and La calda vita (The Warm Life, 1964), Vancini used the pseudonym Stan Vance to make a foray into the Western all’italiana with I lunghi giorni della vendetta (Long Days of Vengeance, 1967). He returned to a more socially committed cinema with La violenza: Quinto potere (The Sicilian Checkmate, 1972), which used the format of the courtroom drama to investigate the links between legal and illegal power networks in Sicily, and Bronte, cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia non hanno raccontato (Liberty, 1972), a fictional re-creation of the brutal reprisal against a small town in southern Italy carried out by the northern Italian forces during the Risorgimento period. This was followed by another attempted historical

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reconstruction in Il delitto Matteotti (The Assassination of Matteotti, 1973) before a turn to an exploration of familial and interpersonal relationships in Amore amaro (Bitter Love, 1974) and Un dramma borghese (Mimi, 1979). Vancini subsequently worked mostly for television, directing, among others, the second run of the very popular long-running series on the Mafia La piovra (Octopus, 1986), as well as the miniseries Piazza di Spagna (1992). In 2005, he returned one last time to the big screen with E ridendo l’uccise (And While Laughing Killed Him), a lavish historical costume drama set in the Renaissance Court of the Este family at Ferrara. VANZINA, CARLO (1951–2018). Screenwriter and director. Son of veteran director Steno (Stefano Vanzina) and younger brother of screenwriter and producer Enrico, Carlo Vanzina could probably, more than any other Italian director, rightfully lay claim to have lived an entire life on screen. At the age of only one, he made a cameo appearance as a cute infant in Steno’s Totò e le donne (Totò and the Women, 1952). After graduating from the French Lycée Chateaubriand in Rome, he nurtured hopes of becoming a film critic but was soon drawn into a more active role in the cinema, first assisting his father on a handful of films and then serving as assistant director on several of Mario Monicelli’s most caustic comedies, including Brancaleone alle crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970) and Amici miei (My Friends, 1975). In 1976, he was able to direct his first feature film, Luna di miele in tre (Honemoon in Three), a risqué sex comedy featuring the stand-up comedian Renato Pozzetto. He continued with two films attempting to launch the film careers of “I gatti di Vicolo Miracoli,” a group of cabaret performers from Verona, followed by several other films effectively showcasing the dynamic talents of another comic performer emerging from the thriving Milanese cabaret scene, the ebullient and voluble Diego Abatantuono. Vanzina’s first major commercial success only came, however, with Sapore di mare (Time for Loving, 1983), a frothy teen holidays-at-the-beach movie that featured a memorable soundtrack of popular songs of the 1960s. Hot on the heels of the film’s box office success, in December of that year he released Vacanze di Natale, an ensemble comedy that outperformed the earlier film at the box office and effectively marked the birth of the well-fated generic formula of the Christmas film, which hostile film critics would, with pejorative intent, label the cinepanettone. For the next 35 years, with brother Enrico regularly serving as cowriter and producer, the Vanzina brothers continued to turn out—often at the rate of two, and sometimes even three, a year—a host of what film critics regularly decried as repetitive and superficial comedies but which, in a time of falling cinema attendance, seldom failed to attract a younger audience. The cinepanettoni in particular, cleverly both set in and released during the Christmas

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period, proved uniquely successful in drawing entire families back into the cinemas in what for many Italians became part of the Christmas ritual. There were also occasional forays into the other genres, in particular a number of reasonably successful variations of the giallo in films such as Sotto il vestito niente (Nothing Underneath, 1985) and Squillo (Call Girl, 1996), and a somewhat less successful attempt at the comic poliziottesco in Il ritorno del Monnezza (The Return of Monezza, 2005), a film that clearly failed to revive the legendary character made famous by Tomas Milian in a series of police thrillers of the 1970s. After producing some 20 further broad comedies and cinepanettoni in the past decade, the Vanzina brothers’ last film, released just before Carlo’s untimely death at the age of 67, was Caccia al tesoro (Treasure Hunt, 2017), a tragicomic heist film nodding in the direction of the commedia all’italiana in which their father had so excelled. VANZINA, STEFANO (1917–1988). Screenwriter and director. Although probably best remembered for a string of delightful comedies that he directed during the early 1950s, Vanzina, better known as Steno, was a professional and versatile director who could work comfortably across a variety of genres. While studying law at the University of Rome, Vanzina became one of the animators of the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio. In the late 1930s, together with a number of other writers from the magazine, he began to work as a screenwriter, helping to pen a series of films directed by Mario Mattoli and featuring popular comic actor Erminio Macario. In the immediate postwar period, he continued to work as a screenwriter before making his own directorial debut in 1949 with Al diavolo la celebrità (Fame and the Devil, 1949), the first of nine films that he would direct in partnership with Mario Monicelli. In the same year, together with Monicelli, he directed Totò cerca casa (Totò Looks for an Apartment, 1949), the first of 13 films he would make with master comic actor Totò, which would include the much-acclaimed Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), nominated for the Grand Prize at Cannes, as well as Totò a colori (Totò in Color, 1952), the first Italian film to be made in color. After L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù (Man, Beast and Virtue, 1953), an adaptation of a play by Luigi Pirandello that featured Orson Welles in one of the major roles, Vanzina directed the now-legendary Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome, 1954), the film that confirmed without doubt the comic talents of Alberto Sordi. While he continued to show a marked propensity for the comic genre throughout his career, in the early 1970s Vanzina also made a foray into the gangster genre with Cose di Cosa Nostra (Gang War, 1971) and directed several tense police thrillers, the best known being La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad, 1972) with which he is often credited with having launched the poliziesco genre. He scored one of his biggest successes of the 1970s with

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Febbre da cavallo (Horse Fever, 1976), a comedy set in the world of horse racing. In the late 1980s, he returned to the poliziesco with six films made for television, featuring Bud Spencer as the maverick police commissioner, “Big Man” Jack Clementi, also known as the Professor. VENICE FESTIVAL. Now regarded as the most important event in the Italian film calendar, the Venice Festival (more precisely the “Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica”) is also the oldest film festival in the world, being inaugurated in 1932 when the screening of films was first incorporated into the Venice Biennial Exhibition of the Arts. Although initiated as a project by private tourist operators as a stratagem for attracting more visitors to Venice, it was also strongly supported by the Fascist government through its Institute of Educational Cinema (Istituto Internazionale della Cinematografia Educativa) as a way of demonstrating the regime’s modern outlook and its openness to the international exchange of ideas. Indeed, in its early years the festival was relatively liberal and included not only Hollywood fare such as Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), with which the festival opened in 1932, but also films of ideological persuasion contrary to the regime, such as René Clair’s À nous la liberté (1932) and Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece La grande illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937). The festival proved so popular that after its second edition in 1934 it was transformed from a mere adjunct to the biennial Arts Exhibition to an autonomous annual event. At the same time, its changed from an exhibition to a competition, with films now contending for the prize of the Mussolini Cup for either Best Italian Film or Best Foreign Film. Beginning in 1935, actors were also in competition for the Volpi Cup, named after the festival’s founder and promoter, Count Giuseppe Volpi. In the same year, an international commission was constituted to judge and award the prizes, and in 1937, the event was able to move into its own purpose-built venue, the Palazzo del Cinema, designed by the renowned modernist architect Luigi Quagliata. However, the regime gradually assumed tighter control of the festival’s organizational reins, and in the wake of the withdrawal of the American majors from the Italian market in 1938—in response to the Fascist government asserting its monopoly over all film distribution in Italy—the festival was reduced to a largely European affair. From 1940 to 1942, it shrank further to include and recognize only films that promulgated the ideology of the German-Italian alliance, and in 1943, the intensification of the war led to the festival being discontinued altogether. The festival was reinstated in 1946 when it hosted, among others, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945), with the prize for Best Film going to Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945). In 1949, the festival’s major prize was officially designated as the Golden Lion in deference to the city’s crest, and

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the program was expanded to include special sessions for children’s films, short films, and documentaries. In the following years, although often riven with political controversy, it continued to host in competition some of the best national and international films, to highlight and champion particular themes, and to create new categories of award. However, in 1968, echoing what was happening elsewhere in the country, violent protests and demonstrations disrupted the festival, leading organizers to continue the screening of films for the next decade but, with the exception of Golden Lions recognizing the careers of a number of major international directors in 1971–1972, to discontinue the award of prizes. The festival itself was not held in 1973, 1977, or 1978. The festival’s fortunes came to be greatly revived during the artistic directorship of Carlo Lizzani (1979–1982), with the award of prizes resuming in 1980, and new categories and events, and new awards recognizing lifetime and other achievements, continuing to be introduced in the following years. Two important innovations were the Settimana Internazionale della Critica (International Critics Week), introduced as a parallel session in 1984 under the aegis of the Sindacato Nazionale Critici Cinematografici Italiani (National Union of Italian Film Critics) and Le Giornate degli autori (Authors’ Week) sponsored by the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (National Film Writers’ Association) since 2004. In 2007, the Queer Lion award was introduced in order to recognize films dealing with LGBTQ themes and celebrating queer culture. In 2012, under the directorship of Alberto Barbera, the festival came to be streamlined into five sections: In Concorso (In Competition), Fuori Concorso (Out of Competition), Orrizonti (Horizons), Settimana della critica, and Giornate degli autori. Nevertheless, each edition of the festival presents opportunities for special events, retrospectives, and innovations. In 2013, to mark its 70th edition, 70 international directors were invited to make a short film each, as part of its special project, Venice 70—Future Reloaded. The year 2015 saw the introduction of the Cinema in the Garden, a new session of outdoor screenings and forums of more mainline films, and in 2016, the first two episodes of Paolo Sorrentino’s HBO television series The Young Pope were hosted out of competition. Moving with the times, in 2017 the new section Venice Virtual Reality was introduced. Held separately at the Isola del Lazzaretto, it allowed accredited visitors to view in one day a selection of the virtual reality films in competition, carefully monitored by designated guides so that visitors would not bump into walls or each other. The session has continued to be offered in subsequent years. A full listing of festival winners in the major categories is given in the appendix.

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VERDONE, CARLO (1950–). Actor and director. Son of film historian and critic Mario Verdone, Carlo studied directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While serving his apprenticeship as assistant director on several minor films, he also worked extensively in cabaret theater and on radio. In 1977, he wrote, directed, and acted in Tali e quali (Just So!), a stage show in which he played a dozen different comic characters, which displayed his remarkable talent for accurate impersonation. He was soon parading his characters on television in the popular long-running comedy series Non stop (1977–1979). After a minor role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (Luna, 1979), Verdone met Sergio Leone, who agreed to produce his first feature, Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful, 1980). The film again amply displayed Verdone’s talent for playing multiple character types and earned him a Special David di Donatello and a Nastro d’argento. There followed Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Green, 1981) and Borotalco (Talcum Powder, 1982), which won five Davids, including for Best Film and Best Actor. His popularity and critical acclaim continued unabated in the following years as the character types he created in films such as Acqua e sapone (Soap and Water, 1983), Troppo forte (Great!, 1985), Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I, 1987), Compagni di scuola (School Friends, 1988), Maledetto il giorno che t’ho incontrato (Damned the Day I Met You, 1992), Al lupo, al lupo (Wolf! Wolf!, 1992), and Perdiamoci di vista (Let’s Not Keep in Touch, 1994) searingly satirized the foibles of young Italian males in perpetual personal crisis. In the new millennium, as well as continuing to direct himself in another dozen generally well-received comedies, and indeed scoring the Nastro d’argento for Best Comedy with Grande, grosso e . . . Verdone (2008) and Posti in piedi in paradiso (A Flat for Three, 2012), he has also appeared in films directed by others, notably in Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’ amore (The Manual of Love, 2005), Manuale d’amore 2 (Manual of Love 2, 2007), and Italians (2009). As proof of his versatility, in 2013 his strong performance in the dramatic role of the failed playwright Romano in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), saw him both nominated for the David di Donatello and awarded the Nastro d’argento for Best Supporting Actor. VERGANO, ALDO (1891–1957). Screenwriter and director. After fighting as a volunteer in World War I, Vergano became a militant left-wing journalist and wrote for a number of radical newspapers. In 1925, he was associated with the unsuccessful Zaniboni plot to kill Benito Mussolini but miraculously escaped prosecution. He became a traveling salesman for a period until he met Alessandro Blasetti and was drawn to writing for Blasetti’s film journal, Cinematografo. He then worked with Blasetti on Sole (Sun, 1929), for which he wrote both the story and the screenplay, and soon followed Blasetti

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to the new Cines studios, where he directed the documentary Fori imperiali (The Imperial Forums, 1932). Thereafter he worked extensively as writer, cowriter, and sometimes production manager on a wide variety of films, including Goffredo Alessandrini’s Don Bosco (1935) and Cavalleria (Cavalry, 1936) and Mario Bonnard’s L’albero di Adamo (Adam’s Tree, 1937) while also directing two features, Pietro Micca (1938) and Quelli della montagna (Men of the Mountain, 1943). An active member of the Partito d’Azione (Action Party), Vergano fought in the Resistance movement and, in the immediate postwar period, directed what is widely regarded as the great classic Resistance film, Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946), which was financed by the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (National Association of Italian Partisans) and enlisted the collaboration of a number of later directors such as Carlo Lizzani, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Giuseppe De Santis to act in the major roles. Although schematic and rather partisan, in all senses, the film was widely praised, receiving the International Critics Award—Special Mention prize at the Venice Festival that year and earning Vergano a special Nastro d’argento in 1947 for his direction. However, none of the handful of films he made subsequently received any praise or critical attention, and he is reputed to have died lonely and disappointed after having drafted his aptly titled memoirs, Cronache di anni perduti (Chronicles of Wasted Years), published posthumously in 1958. VICARI, DANIELE (1967–). Director, screenwriter, and film critic. A prominent member of the new generation of writer-directors emerging in the new millennium, Vicari graduated in film studies from the University of Rome in the late 1980s, after having studied with the Marxist film historian Guido Aristarco. While contributing film reviews to several leading Italian film journals, he began to make short documentaries dealing with social issues. His first, Uomini e lupi (Men and Wolves, 1997), filmed in Betacam video, dealt with the primitive conditions of Macedonian shepherds living in the mountainous region of the Gran Sasso. At the same time, he teamed up with a number of other political and socially committed young filmmakers to make the historical documentary Partigiani (Partisans, 1997). After several other documentaries dealing with recent Italian history and Morto che parla, a short film contributed to a commemorative project marking the 25th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, he made his first full feature, Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity / V-Max, 2002), a film about urban car culture and streetcar racing in Rome, which brought him the David di Donatello for Best Emerging Director. His second feature, L’orizzonte degli eventi (Event Horizon, 2005), the story of a young scientist conducting research in an underground physics laboratory who is forced to confront an even more difficult reality in the mountains outside, was less well received. Able to

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move with ease between fiction and nonfiction, Vicari then made Il mio paese (My Country, 2006), a film that pays homage to Joris Ivens’s groundbreaking documentary L’Italia non è un paese povero (Italy Is Not a Poor Country, 1960) by attempting to retrace in reverse its original journey through a country then on the threshold of an economic miracle and now in the throes of globalization and postindustrial decline. Screened to great acclaim in the Orizzonti section of the 2006 Venice Festival, Il mio paese won the David for Best Documentary of the year. Three years later, Vicari’s third fictional feature Il passato è un paese straniero (The Past Is a Foreign Land, 2008), loosely adapting a recently published award-winning novel by Gianrico Carofiglio, focused on one of Vicari’s preferred themes, the search for personal identity. Continuing to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, Vicari then made Diaz—Don’t Clean up This Blood (2012), a portrayal and denunciation of the indiscriminate violence with which the Italian authorities had responded to the mass protests that had erupted at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, and the death of a young activist, Carlo Giuliani, that had resulted. In the same year with La nave dolce (The Human Cargo, 2012), Vicari revisited the hostile reaction of the Italian government to the first wave of Albanian immigration to Italy in 1991 when some 20,000 Albanians made the journey to Italy in a single overcrowded ship and were promptly locked up in the local sports stadium and then summarily deported. Regarding pedagogy as one aspect of his social and political activism—in 2004 he had already coauthored, with Antonio Medici, an award-winning high school manual, L’alfabeto dello sguardo: Capire il linguaggio audiovisivo (Alphabet of the Look: Understanding Audiovisual Language)—in 2011 Vicari helped found, and began teaching in, the Scuola d’Arte Cinematografica Gian Maria Volonté (Gian Maria Volonté School of Film Art), the first publicly funded film school in Italy, instituted in honor of the great actor. Vicari returned to feature filmmaking with Sole, cuore, amore (Sun, Heart, Love, 2017), the moving portrayal of the close friendship between two very different working-class women caught in the trials and tribulations of making a living in contemporary Rome. His most recent film made for RAI television, Prima che la notte (Before the Night, 2018), a portrait of Giuseppe “Pippo” Fava, a Sicilian writer and fearless anti-Mafia activist murdered in 1984 for his all-too-effective investigative journalism, was awarded the first Nastro della legalità, a newly instituted prize recognizing films and filmmakers committed to the cause of legality and civic responsibility. See also EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION. VILLAGGIO, PAOLO (1932–2017). Actor, writer, and dubber. A prolific writer and a much-loved actor whose comic genius has come to be widely regarded in Italy as second only to the legendary Totò, Villagio abandoned university law studies in his native Genoa and, for many years, worked as a

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clerk in the office of the large industrial company Cosider, while at night attempting to break into the city’s blossoming cabaret scene. In 1967, by his own account, it was while performing in a Genoan flea-pit theater together with his lifelong friend, singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André, that he was discovered by theatrical entrepreneur and later talk show host Maurizio Costanzo, who engaged him to appear in his own cabaret venue in Rome. A year later, having come to the notice of television producers, he was hired to regularly host the popular weekend variety show Quelli della domenica (Sunday People). There, in the guise of a clearly false and somewhat authoritarian magician named Professor Kranz, he challenged the audience with a very aggressive cabaret act but was soon also including monologues by a number of other imaginary characters, among them a farcically obsequious and servile individual, modeled on a clerk he had known during his years at the Cosider, whom he named Ugo Fantozzi. The increasing popularity of Fantozzi’s television monologues prompted the popular weekly magazine L’Europeo to offer Villaggio a regular column in which the wretched accountant-clerk could recount his continuing foibles and misadventures. By 1971, Villaggio was able to gather and publish all these pieces in a single volume. Simply titled Fantozzi, the book sold more than one million copies in Italy alone, an unexpected but stellar success that would prompt Villaggio to eventually publish seven more volumes under the character’s name. In the midst of all this activity, Villaggio had also begun to act in films, generally in over-the-top comic roles that seemed to be second nature to him. After a minor role in Francesco Casaretti’s less-than-memorable Mangiala (Eat It, 1968), he began to shine as the leader of a motley gang of would-be outlaws in Aldo Lado’s comic Western I quattro del Pater Noster (In the Name of the Father, 1969), and he appeared in a handful of other films before joining Vittorio Gassman’s ragtag army as the wily and aggressive German knight, Thorz, in Mario Monicelli’s Brancaleone alle crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades, 1970). Rapidly maturing as an actor, he was able to take on more nuanced dramatic roles, as in Nanni Loy’s Sistemo l’America e torno (I Fix America and Return, 1974) before being drawn back, inevitably, to brilliant slapstick when director Luciano Salce proposed a film adaptation of the first volume of the Fantozzi saga, starring, naturally enough, Villaggio himself. Topping the box office that year, Fantozzi (White Collar Blues, 1975) thus became the first of what would be nine more filmic iterations of the character in the next decade and a half, all played by Villaggio: Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (The Second Tragic Fantozzi, 1976), Fantozzi contro tutti (Fantozzi against the Wind, 1980), Fantozzi subisce ancora (Fantozzi Suffers On, 1983), Super Fantozzi (1986), Fantozzi va in pensione (Fantozzi Retires, 1988), Fantozzi alla riscossa (Fantozzi Strikes Back,

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1990), Fantozzi in paradiso (Fantozzi in Heaven, 1993), Fantozzi—il ritorno (Fantozzi Returns, 1996), and Fantozzi 2000—la clonazione (Fantozzi 2000—the Cloning, 1999). Avoiding the obvious risk of remaining straitjacketed by the comic mask that he had created, Villaggio gave proof of the depth and versatility of his acting skills when, in the 1990s, he returned to the stage and acquitted himself admirably in his interpretations of some of the great roles of the classic repertoire, coming to be particularly praised in 1996 for his portrayal of Arpagon in Giorgio Strehler’s production of Molière’s L’avare (The Miser). The full range of his acting was further confirmed in these later years by the roles he shouldered in a number of films by the veteran art cinema auteurs, with his moving and very nuanced performance in Federico Fellini’s La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1991) earning him the prestigious David di Donatello award and a nomination for the Nastro d’argento as Best Actor. A year later, to general acclaim at the Venice Festival he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In the new millennium, he significantly reduced his involvement with the big screen to generally minor roles in some dozen films but continued to appear on television, work on the stage, and publish what at the time of his death would amount to some 30 volumes, including, in addition to the eight Fantozzi books, Storia della libertà del pensiero (History of Freedom of Thought, 2008), La vera vita di Carlo Martello (The True Life of Charles Martel, 2011)—the subject of one of Fabrizio De André’s best-loved ballads for which Villaggio had contributed the lyrics many years before—and Non mi fido dei santi—autobiografia bugiarda (I Don’t Trust Saints—an Unreliable Autobiography, 2011). In 2009, he was awarded a Special David for his career, although the greatest recognition of his contribution to Italian cinema and culture had arguably already occurred with the adjective fantozziano (Fantozzi-like) having by that time entered common Italian parlance as a term indicating gross ineptitude and ludicrous incompetence. VINCENZONI, LUCIANO (1926–2013). Screenwriter and producer. Having graduated with a degree in law from university, Vincenzoni nevertheless turned his back on a legal career in order to work in cinema. After supplying the story for Aldo Fabrizi’s Hanno rubato un tram (We’ve Stolen a Tram, 1954), he began his screenwriting career by collaborating with Pietro Germi on the screenplay of Il ferroviere (Man of Iron, 1956). Following a number of less-distinguished films, such as Angelo Dorigo’s Amore e guai (Love and Troubles, 1958), Vincenzoni established his reputation as a first-rate screenwriter with the story and the screenplay for Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), for which he received a shared nomination for the Nastro d’argento. Having collaborated with Carlo Lizzani on the

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script for Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), and with Mario Camerini on Crimen (And Suddenly It’s Murder!, 1960) and I briganti italiani (Seduction of the South, 1961), he worked again with Germi on Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964) and Signori e signore (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, 1965), for each of which he shared the Nastro d’argento. Greater financial, if not critical, success came from his sometimes stormy collaboration with Sergio Leone, with whom he cowrote Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966) and Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker, 1971). He subsequently worked on a wide range of both Italian and international films, including the unsuccessful Jaws imitation Orca (The Killer Whale, 1977), directed by Michael Anderson, which Vicenzoni produced as well as scripted, and Duccio Tessari’s CIA thriller Beyond Justice (1992). In 1996, with more than 60 films to his credit, he was awarded the Flaiano International Prize for career achievement. In 2000, his short story “Ma l’amore no” (“But Not Love”) was used by Giuseppe Tornatore as the basis for the screenplay of Malèna (2000). He subsequently retired from the industry but in 2005 published his autobiography, Pane e cinema: Il racconto di una vita straordinaria e avventurosa consacrata al mondo del cinema (Bread and Cinema: An Account of an Extraordinary and Adventurous Life Consecrated to the World of Cinema, 2005). In 2008, director Claudio Costa produced Il falso bugiardo (The False Liar), an 80-minute documentary on Vincenzoni’s life and work, based on his autobiography. VIRZÌ, PAOLO (1964–). Director and screenwriter. One of the most promising young directors to emerge as part of the New Italian Cinema of the 1990s, Virzì graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he specialized in screenwriting. After collaborating on the screenplays of Giuliano Montaldo’s Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill, 1989) and Gabriele Salvatores’s Turné (Tour, 1990), he made his own directorial debut with La bella vita (Living It Up, 1994), an ironic portrait of working-class life in provincial Italy that earned him both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento for Best New Director. His second feature, Ferie d’agosto (Summer Holidays, 1996), a caustic social comedy in the best tradition of the commedia all’italiana, received similar acclaim and was awarded that year’s David for Best Film. A year later, the heartwarming working-class comingof-age tale Ovosodo (Hardboiled Egg, 1997) was both a commercial and critical success and won the Special Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Festival. There followed Baci e abbracci (Kisses and Hugs, 1999), a quirky story revolving around the attempt by three retrenched workers to establish their own ostrich farm in Tuscany, and My Name Is Tanino (2001), a bemused

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portrayal of the misadventures of a Sicilian boy attempting to follow his American dream in America. Virzì then scored what perhaps has remained his biggest national and international success with Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City, 2003), a biting critique of contemporary Italian foibles carried out in the form of another coming-of-age movie. After also appearing in a small role in Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano (The Caiman, 2006), Virzì directed N (Io e Napoleone) (Napoleon and Me, 2006), a historical costume drama that uses Napoleon’s period of exile on the island of Elba as a way to reflect on contemporary Italian mores. His subsequent films have continued to attract both popular and critical acclaim with La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing, 2010), earning him a further David for Best Screenplay, and Il capitale umano (Human Capital, 2014), an adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s novel of the same name that won Davids for both Best Film and Best Screenplay. La pazza gioia (Like Crazy, 2016), a spirited tragicomedy dealing generously with mental illness, received four Nastri d’argento, including the award for Best Score, which was composed by Virzì himself. A year later, moving to America, he directed Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland in The Leisure Seeker (2017), a contemporary road movie in which an elderly couple attempt to live their last days to the fullest. Returning to Italy, he released Notti magiche (Magical Nights, 2018), an attempt, perhaps only partly successful, to evoke the magic atmosphere of filmmaking in Rome in the heady days of the 1960s. VISCONTI, LUCHINO (1906–1976). Screenwriter and director of opera, theater, and film. Acknowledged as one of the all-time great directors of the Italian cinema, Visconti was born into a rich and noble family that traced its ancestry back to the rulers of Milan during the Renaissance period. The family had always had an extremely close association with the Teatro alla Scala, and Visconti’s most passionate interests in his youth were music, opera, literature, and the theater. After studying in the finest private schools in northern Italy, he joined the Royal Cavalry Regiment and was quickly promoted to the rank of officer. On his release from military service, having become an excellent rider and a passionate horse lover, he established himself successfully as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the early 1930s, during frequent stays in Paris, he became closely acquainted with many of the leading French artists and intellectuals and, through his friendship with fashion designer Coco Chanel, was introduced to French director Jean Renoir. With cinema now added to his passionate interests, Visconti began working with Renoir, initially as an uncredited properties master on Toni (1935) and then hired officially as costume designer and third assistant director on Une partie de campagne (A Day in the Country,

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1936). The experience of working with Renoir in France not only introduced Visconti to filmmaking but also left him deeply and permanently influenced by Renoir’s left-wing politics and by the ideology of the Popular Front. After extensive travels in Europe and America, Visconti returned to Italy and in 1939 moved to Rome, where Renoir and his assistant, Carl Koch, had arrived to direct a version of Tosca at the Scalera studios. Given their earlier experience and the friendship that had developed between them, Renoir invited Visconti to collaborate on the screenplay and to serve as second assistant director for the film. When the outbreak of the war forced Renoir to abandon Italy, Visconti helped Koch complete the film, although the relative contribution of each to the final product has always remained unclear. During this time he also met, and became part of, a group of militant young critics writing for the prestigious film journal Cinema that included Giuseppe De Santis, Mario Alicata, and Gianni Puccini. It was with this group that Visconti would produce his first film, an adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which, beginning as Palude (Swamp), eventually became Ossessione (1943). A steamy noir narrative in which a handsome young drifter helps a beautiful woman to murder her older husband, effectively transposed from heartland America to northern Italy, Ossessione was stunningly innovative in both content and style and unlike anything previously produced in Italian cinema. The film was warmly acclaimed when first screened to an invited audience in 1943, but its morally questionable content and its powerful realism provoked a generally hostile reaction from conservative authorities in many places where it was subsequently shown. Consequently, the film, later acknowledged as a milestone in the history of Italian cinema, was not seen again in Italy until after the war. Meanwhile, as the war itself intensified, Visconti took an ever more active part in the Resistance movement. In April 1944, he was arrested and imprisoned, and he was released only with the arrival of the Allied forces. Immediately following the war, Visconti collaborated with Mario Serandrei and others on the making of Giorni di Gloria (Days of Glory, 1945), a documentary on the Resistance financed by the National Partisan Association, before devoting himself almost exclusively to the theater, soon becoming renowned for his superb productions of contemporary plays, among them Jean Cocteau’s Les parents terribles and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. A documentary about Sicilian fishermen commissioned by the Italian Communist Party expanded greatly to become Visconti’s second feature film, La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). Based on Giovanni Verga’s 19thcentury novel I Malavoglia, the three-hour film was largely improvised on location in the Sicilian fishing village of Aci Trezza, using as actors only the local people, who spoke the dialogue in their own dialect. Although the film thus thoroughly exemplified what by now had become established as all the

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major tenets of Neorealism, it was very poorly received on its theatrical release, in part because its all-too-genuine dialect was largely incomprehensible to non-Sicilians. A subsequent version dubbed into standard Italian fared little better at the box office. A disappointed Visconti returned to the theater and, for the next decade and a half, continued to divide his energies between the stage and the screen. After more theatrical triumphs, which included a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It designed by Salvador Dalí, Visconti returned to the cinema with Bellissima (1951), the story of a Roman working-class mother obsessively trying to get her young daughter into the movies. By contrast with Visconti’s previous film, Bellissima was critically praised and earned Anna Magnani, as the misguided mother, her fourth Nastro d’argento. Theater and screen began to come closer together in Visconti’s next film, Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954), an operatic melodrama that attracted much praise for its sumptuous elegance and pictorial style but was also criticized for what appeared to some to be a negative portrayal of the Risorgimento. A more modest film, Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957), adapted from a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was better received and awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Festival. With Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Visconti returned to his Neorealist roots to recount the tragic story of a southern Italian family disintegrating when transplanted into the northern city of Milan. Fiercely attacked for what conservatives saw as its left-wing political leanings and censored for some of its graphic violence, the film was nevertheless hailed as a major cinematic achievement, confirmed by the award of three Nastri d’argento, a David di Donatello, and the Special Prize at Venice, where underhanded political lobbying deprived it of the Golden Lion for which it had been nominated. After “Il lavoro” (“Work”), an episode of the compilation film Boccaccio ’70 (1962), Visconti directed what remains perhaps his most celebrated film, Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). A near-perfect adaptation of the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, set once again in the Risorgimento period, the film was a huge critical and box office success, although its budget overrun also contributed to bankrupting its production company, Titanus. Then, after more work in the theater, including a memorable production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore in London’s Covent Garden, Visconti returned to the screen with Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra, 1965), an intense family drama that finally brought him the Golden Lion at Venice. There followed the short “La strega bruciata viva” (“The Witch Burned Alive”), made as an episode for the portmanteau film Le streghe (The Witches, 1967), and Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967), adapted from Albert Camus’s existentialist novel of the same name, before the monumental La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1970). Portraying the violent disintegration of a powerful and wealthy German family as a mirror for the social dissolution of Germany

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itself under the onslaught of Nazism, The Damned was greater in scope and spectacle than any of Visconti’s previous films and proved to be an unqualified success, both critically and at the box office. A year later, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971) adapted a novella by Thomas Mann to paint the elegiac portrait of another dissolution, this time of an aging composer identifiable with Gustav Mahler but with undeniable allusions to Visconti himself. A year later with his next film, Ludwig (1973), filmed but yet to be edited, Visconti suffered a minor stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side. Nevertheless, in the next few months, with great will and determination, he struggled back to the point of not only being able to complete the film but also to accept an invitation to return to the theater and direct a much-acclaimed version of Manon Lescaut at the 1973 Spoleto Festival. Although this would be his theatrical swan song, he would manage, even if from a wheelchair, to direct two further films, Ritratto di una famigla in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) and L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976), passing away in March 1976 as this final film was still in the process of postproduction.

Luchino Visconti directing Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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VITROTTI, GIOVANNI (1882–1966). Cameraman and documentarist. A historic pioneer of the Italian cinema, Vitrotti worked for Arturo Ambrosio and his companies from 1905 to 1913 (and again between 1918 and 1920), often in collaboration with fellow cameraman and passionate documentarist Roberto Omegna. After shooting a huge number of both documentaries and feature films for Ambrosio Film in Turin, Vitrotti made several trips to Russia and central Europe in 1909 and 1911 as part of Ambrosio’s partnership with German and Russian film companies, contributing, among other things, his technical knowledge and experience to the development of the fledgling Russian film industry. On his return to Italy in 1914, Vitrotti founded his own company, Leonardo Film, which, however, folded within a year. He subsequently worked for Musical Film and the Neapolitan Polifilm company before being conscripted into the army and serving as a documentarist for the Italian armed forces for the duration of World War I. From 1921 to 1931, he worked mostly in Germany before returning to Italy, where he served as a cinematographer for hire on a score of films, including Mario Bonnard’s Tre uomini in frac (I Sing for You Alone, 1932), Alessandro Blasetti’s La contessa di Parma (The Duchess of Parma, 1937), Ferdinando Maria Poggioli’s L’amore canta (Love Song, 1941), and Luigi Zampa’s Fra’ Diavolo (The Adventures of Fra Diavolo, 1942). In the postwar period, he photographed another handful of minor films before retiring from the cinema altogether in 1953. VITTI, MONICA (1931–). Actress, writer, and director. Although outside Italy Monica Vitti (born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli) is probably best remembered for her intensely dramatic roles in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, in Italy she has always been better known as a comic actress, a talent that quickly came to the fore at the Rome Academy of Dramatic Art, from which she graduated in 1953. Her first (uncredited) film role was in Ridere, Ridere, Ridere (Laugh, Laugh, Laugh, 1954), a series of comic sketches directed by Edoardo Anton. While pursuing her career on the stage with the SbragiaLisi-Ronconi company, she met Antonioni, who used her voice to dub Alida Valli in his Il grido (The Cry, 1957). There followed the major films with Antonioni: L’avventura (1960), La notte (The Night, 1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), intense portraits of existential ennui and alienation in which Vitti became the perfect mouthpiece for Antonioni himself. After more stage work, which included a 1964 production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, she moved decisively to film comedy, from then on starring in a host of commedie all’italiana including Mario Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Pistol, 1968); Amore mio aiutami (Help Me My Love, 1969), in which she acted with and was directed by Alberto Sordi; and Dino Risi’s Noi donne siamo

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fatte così (That’s How We Women Are, 1971). At the same time, she worked with international directors, appearing in, among others, Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966), Miklós Jancsó’s La pacifista (The Pacifist, 1970), and Luis Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974).

Monica Vitti toting a gun in Mario Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Pistol, 1968). Courtesy of Photofest.

After returning briefly to work with Antonioni in Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1981), she withdrew from the cinema during the 1980s except for two films directed by her then partner, Roberto Russo, Flirt (1983) and Francesca è mia (Francesca Is Mine, 1986), preferring during this period to concentrate on the theater, which came to include appearing in a female version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1987), directed by Franca Valeri. In 1990, she returned to the big screen, directing herself in Scandalo segreto (Secret Scandal, 1990), for which she won Italian Golden Globes for

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both acting and direction. Soon thereafter she published an autobiography, Sette sottane (Seven Underskirts, 1993), which won the Fregene Prize for biography, and a novel, Il letto è una rosa (The Bed Is a Rose, 1995), whose plot revolves around the editing of a film. During a long and distinguished career, Vitti won five David di Donatello awards and three Nastri d’argento. In 1995, she received a Golden Lion at the Venice Festival for her lifetime achievement. Most recently her life and work has been remembered and honored with a extensive multimedia exhibition in Rome’s Teatro dei Dioscuri under the rubric of La dolce Vitti (2018). VLAD, ROMAN (1919–2013). Composer, musicologist, pianist, orchestra director, and writer. Born in the then-Romanian city of Černivci (now part of Ukraine), Vlad obtained his diploma in piano in his native city before migrating in 1938 to Italy, where he studied engineering at the University of Rome while simultaneously pursuing postgraduate musical studies under Alfredo Casella at the National Academy of Saint Cecilia. In 1942, his early composition Sinfonietta was awarded the prestigious Enescu Prize. While continuing his musicological studies, a close friendship with art lover and film director Luciano Emmer drew him to composing music for the cinema, beginning with Emmer’s early study of Giotto, Racconto da un affresco (Story from a Fresco, 1939–1941). After having composed the score for Mario Soldati’s Eugenie Grandet (1946), in 1950 he was awarded the Nastro d’argento for the “Miglior Commento Musicale” (Best Musical Score) for, inclusively, Gianni Franciolini’s La sposa non può attendere (The Bride Couldn’t Wait, 1949), René Clément’s Le mura di Malapaga (The Walls of Malapaga, 1949), Marcel L’Herbier’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Sins of Pompeii, 1950), René Clair’s La beauté du diable (Beauty and the Devil, 1950), Emmer’s Domenica d’agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), and Géza von Radványi’s Donne senza nome (Women without Names, 1950). By the mid-1950s, while teaching musicology and serving as artistic director of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, he had also initiated a close collaboration with Riccardo Freda, for whom he scored I vampiri (Lust of the Vampire, 1957), Caltiki il mostro immortale (Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, 1959), and L’orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock (The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, 1962), as well as working with Renato Castellani on Giulietta e Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, 1954), I sogni nel cassetto (Dreams in a Drawer, 1957), and then later on the miniseries Castellani directed for RAI national television, titled La vita di Leonardo da Vinci (The Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, 1971, five episodes). At the same time, his score for Francesco Rosi’s debut film, La sfida (The Challenge, 1959), earned him a nomination for another Nastro d’argento.

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Undoubtedly due to his myriad academic and musical commitments, in the 1970s his film scores diminished. However, while serving as artistic director of the RAI Symphony Orchestra in 1978 he contributed the music to young Gianni Amelio’s two early films made for the national broadcaster, Effetti speciali (Special Effects, 1978) and Il piccolo Archimede (The Little Archimedes, 1979). Nevertheless, following the lack of critical success of Franco Zeffirelli’s Il giovane Toscanini (The Young Toscanini, 1988) Vlad permanently withdrew from the cinema in order to devote himself completely to music for the next 25 years. VOLONTÉ, GIAN MARIA (1933–1994). Actor. One of the most accomplished and distinctive actors in Italy in the postwar period, Volonté was also the foremost representative of a cinema of political commitment and social denunciation. Having graduated from the National Academy of Dramatic Art in 1957, Volonté soon began to draw attention for the intensity of his acting, both in classics on the stage and on television, where he came to particular notice in a much-praised production of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. His film career began in a minor key with a small part in Duilio Coletti’s war drama Sotto dieci bandiere (Under Ten Flags, 1961) and an appearance as the king of Sparta in Vittorio Cottafavi’s peplum Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, 1961). His participation in genre cinema continued with the villains he played in two of Sergio Leone’s Westerns, Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) and Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), and the part of El Chuncho, the bandit leader, in Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967). At the same time, his appearance as Salvatore, the union activist who dares to challenge the power of the Mafia in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Un uomo da bruciare (A Man for Burning, 1962), had opened the way to what would be a long line of much more socially conscious and politically committed roles, particularly in the films of Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi. His interpretation of Paolo Laurana in A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way, 1967), Petri’s adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia’s novel about politics and the Mafia in contemporary Sicily, earned Volonté both a Nastro d’argento in Italy and a nomination for the Palme d’or at Cannes. After appearing as Lieutenant Ottolenghi in Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago, 1970), the first of many films he would make with Rosi, which would include Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972), Lucky Luciano (1973), and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979), he provided what remains perhaps his most stunning and engaging performance in Petri’s Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1970), which brought him his second Nastro d’argento and a David di Donatello.

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Gian Maria Volonté in Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, 1970), directed by Elio Petri. Courtesy of Photofest.

Highly respected internationally, Volonté was also called to work with a number of non-Italian directors, including Jean-Luc Godard on Le vent d’est (Wind from the East, 1970), André Delvaux on his adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel L’oeuvre au noir (The Abyss, 1988), and Swiss director Claude Goretta on La mort de Mario Ricci (The Death of Mario Ricci, 1983), in an interpretation that was widely praised and for which he received the Best Actor award at Cannes. In 1991, his three decades of achievement were recognized with a career Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. After an extraordinarily thoughtful performance as Judge Vito Di Francesco in Gianni Amelio’s Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990), for which he received both another David and the Special Prize of the Jury at the European Film Awards, Volonté’s career was abruptly ended by a fatal heart attack he suffered while filming Theodoros Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze (1995).

W WERTMÜLLER, LINA (1928–). Screenwriter and director. Born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braucich, a factor that probably conditioned her later taste for long and extravagant titles for her films, Wertmüller trained as a theater director at the Pietro Sharoff Academy in Rome before working extensively in a variety of theatrical forms including musical revues and puppet theater. At the same time, she also worked in radio and television, where she achieved her greatest success with Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (Gian Burrasca’s Diary, 1964), an eight-part series adapted from a famous children’s novel and revealing the considerable acting talents of the young pop singer Rita Pavone. By Wertmüller’s own admission, her most formative film experience was as one of the assistant directors on Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963), which prompted her to make her first feature, I basilischi (The Lizards, 1963), a sort of southern Italian version of Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953). Two years later, in direct response to Ettore Scola’s male-centered Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964), she directed Questa volta parliamo di uomini (This Time Let’s Talk about Men, 1965), a multi-episode film satirizing male-female relations, all episodes featuring Nino Manfredi. Under the pseudonym George H. Brown, Wertmüller then directed Rita la zanzara (Rita the Mosquito, 1966) and Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito, 1967), two lightweight teen musicals that were essentially vehicles for up-and-coming pop singer Rita Pavone. Having also already established something of a reputation as a screenwriter, helping to cowrite, among others, Franco Zeffirelli’s Fratello sole, sorella luna (Brother Sun, Sister Moon, 1972), Wertmüller then soared to international renown with a series of mordant social farces featuring Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini, beginning with Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimi, 1972), nominated for the Palme d’or at Cannes that year, and followed by Film d’amore e anarchia ovvero stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza (Love and Anarchy, 1973) and Travolto da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away, 1974). Made without Melato but with Giannini giving one of his best501

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ever performances, Wertmüller’s next film, Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), achieved strong box office success and was nominated for two Oscars, making Wertmüller the first woman to receive the Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Lina Wertmüller on the set of La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto (A Night Full of Rain, 1978). Courtesy of Photofest.

Most of her subsequent films during the 1980s continued to indulge a baroque tendency to visual and emotional excess, although she was able to achieve more nuanced results in films such as the made-for-television Saba-

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to, domenica e lunedì (Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 1990), an adaptation of an Eduardo De Filippo play that featured Sophia Loren in her best role in years, and with Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore!, 1992), adapted from the best-selling novel by Marcello D’Orta. After the elegant and relatively restrained historical costume drama Ferdinando e Carolina (Ferdinand and Caroline, 1999), she returned to something of her old form with Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Too Much Romance . . . It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers, 2004), a comic family drama starring Sophia Loren and F. Murray Abraham. Alongside her films, Wertmüller continued to direct for the theater and also published a number of novels, among them Essere e avere ma per essere devo avere la testa di Alvise su un piatto d’argento (The Head of Alvise, 1981) and Avrei voluto uno zio esibizionista (I Would Have Liked an Exhibitionist Uncle, 1990). At the same time, she also accepted an appointment as head of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and helped restructure its courses and teaching during her tenure there between 1988 and 1994. In 2010, she was awarded a Special David di Donatello for her career and, two years later, published her autobiography, titled, with untypical understatement, Tutto a posto e niente in ordine: Vita di una regista di buonumore (Everything in Order but Nothing in Its Place: The Life of a Good-Humored Director). Having largely withdrawn from feature filmmaking in the new millennium, in 2014 she nevertheless wrote and directed Roma, Napoli, Venezia . . . in un crescendo rossiniano (Rome, Naples, Venice . . . in a Rossinian Crescendo, 2014), a charming 40-minute documentary in which Giacomo Rossini fictionally returns to travel down the memory lanes of the three cities in which he lived and composed his most famous operas. A year later, she became the subject of Valerio Ruiz’s award-winning documentary Dietro gli occhiali bianchi (Behind the White Glasses, 2015), the title alluding to the characteristic glasses she has always worn. In 2019, she achieved her greatest triumph with the announcement that at the next Academy Awards she would be honored with an Oscar for her outstanding career. WESTERN ALL’ITALIANA. Film genre. The Western Italian style, more commonly known outside Italy as the “Spaghetti Western,” was a prolific genre that flourished in the mid-1960s, largely replacing the peplum, which had held the field in the previous decade. Some 450 such Westerns were made in Italy between 1964 and 1978, mostly as low-budget European or American coproductions and shot, for the most part, at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and on external locations in southern Italy and Spain. Although quite a number of B-grade Westerns had been made in Italy in the early 1960s—and indeed something of a forerunner of the genre had already appeared two decades earlier in Giorgio Ferroni’s Il fanciullo del West (The Boy in the West, 1942)—the film that definitively launched the

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genre and defined its generic characteristics was Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). Stylishly filmed and dramatically punctuated by a stirring musical score composed by Ennio Morricone (at this stage under the pseudonym of Dan Savio), the film was made on a shoestring budget but soon broke all box office records. Its enormous and unexpected commercial success led Leone to make four more of what came to be regarded as classics of the genre: Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), C’era una volta il West (Once upon a Time in the West, 1968), and Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker, 1971). Departing conspicuously from the formula of the classic American Western, which clearly distinguished good and evil and ultimately reasserted the values of society and civilization, in these films Leone delighted in creating a more cynical and self-serving antihero who inhabited a violent and amoral universe in which only the clever and the ruthless survived. The new formula was immediately embraced by a host of other directors, often using Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms for themselves and their actors in an effort to make the films appear more genuinely American. Directors such as Sergio Corbucci, Enzo Barboni, Duccio Tessari, and Gianfranco Parolini created new but recognizable versions of Leone’s gunslinger with no name who, under the guise of Django, Ringo, Sabata, and Sartana, reappeared in so many films as to create subgenres of their own.

Terence Hill and Bud Spencer in Enzo Barboni’s Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity Is Still My Name, 1971). Courtesy of Photofest.

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Although generally regarded as popular escapist fantasy, and in some of its later versions drawing the ire of the censors for its frequent indulgence in extreme and explicit violence, the genre also developed a more politically conscious strand as in Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown, 1966); Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1967), written by Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas; and Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (Kill and Pray, 1967), in which director Pier Paolo Pasolini appears as a revolutionary Mexican priest. After dominating the popular film market for a decade, the genre faded away in the later 1970s, although the slapstick My Name Is Trinity version, starring the comic duo Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, continued to reappear sporadically well into the late 1980s. WHITE TELEPHONE FILMS (TELEFONI BIANCHI). Genre. A generic characterization applied, usually with an imprecise scope but pejorative connotations, to a large number of light comedies and melodramas made in Italy during the Fascist period. Frequently set in elegant upper-class environments, these sophisticated comedies often featured white telephones as part of their decor, hence the name. The majority were produced at Cinecittà between 1937 and 1943, made largely in response to a heightened demand for films for the home market following the withdrawal of the American majors from Italy in the wake of the state monopoly of film distribution introduced by the Alfieri law (1938). Modeled in part on the Hollywood screwball comedy and in part on a form of situational social comedy that was flourishing in Hungary in the 1920s— indeed, a considerable number of them were nominally set in (a largely fictitious) Budapest—these flighty films were extremely popular with audiences but came under fire from serious critics for their frivolousness and unreality. The call for a more realistic and socially conscious cinema that emerged from the pages of film journals such as Cinema was in large part a reaction to the proliferation of the genre. That such films actually served the interests of the Fascist regime in distracting the populace from the harsh realities of the time came to be a widely held view in the immediate postwar period, especially within the context of the advent of Neorealism. However, the extent to which the films may have functioned as a form of indirect propaganda for the regime and its values has continued to be a matter of debate. Although the genre is generally associated with many minor directors, the first three films directed by Vittorio De Sica—Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940), Maddalena zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, 1940), and Teresa Venerdì (Doctor, Beware, 1941)—are usually included under the white telephone rubric, as are Mario Camerini’s Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1939) and Alessandro Blasetti’s La contessa di Parma (The Duchess of

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Parma, 1937). Among the other directors who came to be associated with the genre were Carmine Gallone, Mario Mattoli, Raffaello Matarazzo, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Nunzio Malasomma, Camillo Mastrocinque, Giacomo Gentilomo, and several central European directors also working in Italy at the time, including Max (or Massimiliano) Neufeld, Lászlá Vajda, and László Kish. WINSPEARE, EDOARDO (1965–). Actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. Born in Klagenfurt (Austria) of a Neapolitan father with English ancestry and a mother descended from a noble family from Liechtenstein, Winspeare grew up in Depressa (Puglia) where his English great-grandfather had settled in the 1860s. After studying modern literature at the University of Florence, he spent some time in New York pursuing an interest in photography. In 1988, he returned to Europe and enrolled in filmmaking at the Munich University of Television and Film. He was soon making short films and documentaries, among them A toilette’s short story (1989), Il ghetto di Venezia (The Ghetto of Venice, 1989), San Paolo e la Tarantola (1990), L’ultimo gattopardo (The Last Leopard, 1991), and I grandi direttori della fotografia: Luciano Tovoli (The Great Cinematographers: Luciano Tovoli, 1992). Returning to Depressa, he became passionately involved in researching and promoting the local folk culture, helping, among other things, to found the musical ensemble Zoe, devoted to performing and preserving the pizzica so characteristic of the region. The pizzica thus became the inspiration and the basis of his first feature, Pizzicata (1996), a wartime story in which an American fighter pilot shot down in the Salento during World War II comes to rediscover his own roots in the area. Filmed entirely in the region with largely nonprofessional actors and spoken in the local dialect, the film received the Best New Director Special Mention at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Four years later, Winspeare’s second feature, Sangue vivo (Live Blood, 2000), similarly inspired by the pizzica and filmed in the Salento, brought him the Best New Director award at San Sebastian and, in Italy, a Nastro d’argento nomination for Best Original Story. It also became the first Italian film to be invited to screen at Sundance. His third feature, Il miracolo (The Miracle, 2002), the story of a young boy who comes to believe he’s acquired the ability to perform miracles, competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, in the event winning the FEDIC (Federazione Italiana dei Cineclub) Award and the Award for the City of Rome. Winspeare returned to documentary filmmaking with the short La piazza è chiusa (Closed Piazza, 2006) and La festa che prende fuoco (The Feast That Takes Fire, 2008), recording the mountainous bonfire at the center of the celebrations on the feast day of the patron saint of the town of Novoli, before his next fictional feature, Galantuomini (Brave Men, 2008), the taut story of the impossible love affair between an

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investigating magistrate who returns to the Salento after many years in the north and an old flame who is now the head of the underworld Sacra Corona Unita. There followed another documentary, Sotto il Celio Azzurro (A School with a View, 2009), the portrait of a year in the life of a multicultural kindergarten in Rome’s Celio quarter, and the short L’anima attesa (2013) before In grazia di Dio (Quiet Bliss, 2014), the uplifting story of four women spanning three generations of one family attempting—and succeeding, if only after much effort—in achieving the quiet bliss of a return to a simpler rural existence. Warmly received when it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the film was nominated for five Nastro d’argento awards, including for Best Director and Best Original Story. Winspeare’s most recent La vita in comune (The Ark of Disperata, 2017), a tragicomedy in which a melancholic mayor’s love of poetry manages to revive the fortunes of Disperata, a town in the depths of the Salento that’s come to reflect its unfortunate name (Desperate), was premiered at the 74th Venice Festival where it was awarded the FEDIC prize. In 2018, the Linz Crossing Europe Film Festival honored Winspeare, whom it characterized as “an auteur filmmaker par excellence,” with a complete retrospective of his six features. WOMEN. Traditional histories of Italian cinema, usually written by men, have tended to locate the place of women in that history almost exclusively in front of the camera. Yet more recent and probing research has suggested that women’s contribution to the Italian film industry has been at times both more extensive and more varied than previously acknowledged. Almost invisible at the lowest rung of the ladder of the filmmaking process in the earliest days, it was women who carried out the vital but repetitive process of cleaning, assembling, and at times coloring the films in the crowded workshops of the major production houses. These women were, and most remained, as one film historian put it, the “bricklayers” of silent film production. At the same time, at a much more visible level, it was also women, of course, usually with some background in the theater, who were engaged to perform the required female roles in those films. The meteoric growth of the film industry in the first decade of the 20th century reflected Italian society in being largely male centered, but by the eve of the First World War, a star system, later known as divismo, began to emerge in which women came to occupy a much more prominent position than their male counterparts. Importing a convention from the theatrical world in which many of them had already made their mark, the foremost female stars of the period acquired the status of diva, although few male stars were ever designated as such. While the phenomenon itself was short lived and many, like the diva par excellence, Lyda Borelli, soon terminated their brilliant careers with favorable marriages and abandoned the cinema, there were also a num-

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ber who took advantage of their fame and fortune in order to establish production companies that would allow them to move behind the camera and produce, write, and direct their own films. Most notable was the case of Francesca Bertini. After having long rivaled Borelli for the crown of major diva and become the highest-paid actress in Europe, in 1918 Bertini established her own company, Bertini Films, through which she produced and often cowrote and codirected most of her subsequent films. Another was Polish-born Diana Karenne (born Leokadia Konstantin). Arriving in Italy in 1915, Karenne had soon achieved star status appearing in several films produced by the Turin-based Pasquali company. A year later, she was able to codirect herself for the first time and, in 1917, founded her own production house, Karenne Films, with which in the next four years she produced, wrote, directed, and starred in close to a dozen films, for which she often also designed the posters and the subtitles. Having in such a short period earned a reputation as, in the words of a prominent contemporary critic, “the most intelligent of all our actresses,” she was wise enough to abandon Italy in 1921 when the industry was already sliding into decline and move to France and Germany, where she continued her acting career. Among other female stars who were able to enlarge the scope of their activities beyond appearing on-screen in this period was Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto, an actress and acting teacher who is recorded as having directed five films, among them Leonardo Da Vinci (1919) and the apparently Lubitschinspired A mosca cieca (The Blind Fly, 1921). Withdrawal of the latter film from circulation by the Vatican-based company that had commissioned it on the allegation of religious irreverence led Cassini-Rizzoto to end her film career in Italy and emigrate to Argentina, where she reestablished an acting school. Another actress who was able to broaden her reach within the industry was Genoese-born Ginevra Francesca Rusconi. After reaching the level of first actress in the theater company of Ermete Novelli, she moved to Milan to pursue a career in film, adopting the stage name Elettra Raggio. Having quickly established a solid reputation in front of the camera with appearances in several films produced by the influential Milano Films company, in 1916 she founded her own production company, Raggio Film, through which she produced some dozen films in the next three years, writing, directing, and acting in most of them to significant critical acclaim. Similarly coming from the theater, where she had had a long and successful career as an opera singer, Gemma Bellincioni-Stagno also sought out a second career in the cinema. Unsurprisingly, and despite her mature age, she made her first appearance on the big screen in 1916 playing a role that she had made her own onstage, that of the young Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. Despite a poor critical reception, or perhaps because of it, a year later she founded her own production company, Biancagemma, with which for the

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next five years she produced and directed a dozen films featuring herself and her daughter, Bianca; many of these films were savaged by the critics but apparently well received by film audiences. Particularly interesting was the case of Bianca Virginia Camagni’s progression from actress to producer-director. Having established a reputation for playing the femme fatale, she took on the role of Pierrot in a film financed by a rich industrialist but entrusted to the direction of her male partner, the sculptor Severo Pozzati. In the course of a complicated production history that saw input from too many sources, Pozzati lost control of the film, which resulted in the final product, titled Fantasia bianca (White Fantasy) being something of a confused mess. Premiering in Rome at the prestigious Teatro Costanzi in 1919, the film was incessantly booed, subsequently savaged in the press, and immediately withdrawn from circulation. Eighteen months later, Camagni bought the film rights, shot extra scenes with new characters, and completely reedited the film before reissuing it under the slightly modified title of Fantasia. The film received a much warmer reception, prompting Camagni to set up her own production company in order to write and direct herself in a second film, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 1921), which also received a measure of critical praise. Unfortunately Camagni seems to have then abandoned the industry. However, the most impressive woman working in the film industry in the silent period was undoubtedly Elvira Notari, who, as film historian Giuliana Bruno noted, was one of the very few women who ever succeeded in graduating from coloring the films to owning and running her own film production company. Moving with her family from her native Salerno to Naples, Elvira Coda worked as a milliner before, at the age on 27, marrying Nicola Notari, with whom she would have three children. To support themselves and their family, the couple began painting photographs and coloring films on commission. By 1906, they were producing short films, and by 1912, they had founded their own production company, Films Dora (later renamed Dora Film) complete with its own studios, technical workshops, and even an acting school. The company was run as a family business, with Elvira writing, producing, directing, attending to finances, and teaching in the school; Nicola overseeing the photography; and their son Edoardo regularly acting in the films. Other tasks such as editing were done together by the couple. In this way, the company succeeded over the next two decades in producing some 60 full features and hundreds of shorts. As sole owners of the company, the Notari were able to avoid joining the Unione Cinematografica Italiana, and the company was thus one of the very few not to go under in the great crisis that enveloped the Italian industry in the 1920s; the company continued producing films until 1930, when it did finally close. By that time, Italy had a Fascist government, and even when the film industry began to revive in the early 1930s, the regime’s regressive

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patriarchal ideology would effectively prevent women for the next decade and a half from playing any role in the film industry except those in front of the camera. By the same patriarchal logic that barred female high school teachers from teaching the “higher” subjects of literature and philosophy, female students at the national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, were permitted to study acting, makeup, and stage and costume design but not directing or production. As a result, one struggles in vain to find the name of even one female producer or director in any list of the films produced during the Fascist years. The granting of the vote to women in 1945 augured an epochal change in the position and status of women in Italian society, a development that would inevitably come to be reflected in postwar cinema. Yet if the repertoire of female roles and functions, so narrowly restricted under Fascism, now came to be immeasurably enlarged and modernized on the silver screen, women’s roles and functions within the industry itself took much longer to shift. One would again struggle in vain to name a single female director in either the Neorealist canon or, for that matter, in the genre cinema of the 1950s. And, examined more closely, even what would appear to be an unabashed celebration of women in the cinema of the maggiorate merely confirms a male eye behind the camera; men doing the looking and women, as always, being looked at. Nevertheless, the postwar period did witness some enlargement of female participation in the industry with, for example, Suso Cecchi D’Amico initiating what would be her dominating screenwriting presence in postwar Italian cinema with her collaboration on the screenplay of Renato Castellani’s Mio figlio professore (Professor, My Son, 1946). Real change, however, would come in the early 1960s, with the emergence of Lina Wertmüller. After an apprenticeship with Federico Fellini on 8½ (1963) and her debut directorial feature, I basilischi (The Basilisks, 1963), she was able to parry Ettore Scola’s scathing satire of women in Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964) by turning the camera back onto men in her Questa volta parliamo di uomini (This Time Let’s Talk about Men, 1965). The merciless dissection of male-female relationships that she would continue to carry out in her subsequent films would lead her to becoming the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for her Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975). By this time, another female director had emerged. After having studied at the Centro Sperimentale and served her own apprenticeship making documentaries for the national broadcaster RAI, Liliana Cavani had begun to direct a series of feature films that also attracted international attention, achieving particular notoriety with her Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), a film that was similarly ruthless in exploring male-female relations.

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It’s nevertheless telling that Wertmüller and Cavani remained the only two notable women in the Italian film industry until the mid-1980s, when they were joined by the members of an emerging generation of female cineastes that included Francesca Comencini, Cristina Comencini, Francesca Archibugi, and Wilma Labate. By the mid-1990s, in order to support and encourage a greater participation of women in all areas of film and television in Italy the cultural association Donne nell’Audiovisivo Promotion was formed, which soon affiliated with the worldwide Women in Film and Television International. In 2002, the association instituted the annual Premio Afrodite (Aphrodite Prize) to recognize the achievements of women working across all the professional categories in filmmaking and television but also literature and sport. Partly as the result of such affirmative action, the new millennium witnessed a swelling of the ranks of female directors to include new figures like Asia Argento, Maria Sole Tognazzi, Alina Marazzi, Costanza Quatriglio, Antonietta De Lillo, and Giada Colagrande. In the second decade of the new millennium, effective gender parity in the Italian film industry must still be deemed to be some way off. However, it is encouraging, a century after leading actresses like Francesca Bertini and Diana Karenne created their own production companies and directed themselves in their own films, to see Laura Morante, after appearing in almost 100 films and television series, move behind the camera to direct herself in La cerise sur le gâteau (Cherry on the Cake, 2012) and Assolo (Solo, 2016) or Valeria Golino, with a similar number of acting credits, take the helm in directing features such as Miele (Honey, 2013) and Euforia (Euphoria, 2017). Perhaps the most impressive sign in more recent times has been the absence of a single raised eyebrow at the announcement that a female director like Francesca Comencini had been chosen as showrunner for the third season of such a male province as Gomorra—la serie.

Y YOUNG POPE, THE (2016). Television series. Financed by HBO, Sky Atlantic, and Canal+, and produced by the Italian Wildside, the French Haut et Court TV and the Spanish Mediapro companies, The Young Pope was the first, and very successful, venture into long-form television for Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino. Starring American actor Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, a former archbishop of New York City who, unexpectedly elevated to the Papal Crown, proceeds to disrupt the Vatican as perhaps no pope before him, the limited series of 10 50-minute episodes was made on a budget of €40 million and engaged an international cast that included Diane Keaton as Sister Mary, Belardo’s personal secretary, and Silvio Orlando as his nemesis and inherited secretary of state, Cardinal Voiello. In Italy, the first two episodes of the series were screened as a special event at the Venice Festival on 3 September 2016 before premiering on the Sky pay TV network on 21 October, where it attracted a record audience of 953,000, thus beating the previous record set by the release of the first season of Gomorra—la serie. In the United States, the first episode was aired on HBO on 15 January 2017, similarly breaking all records in attracting one million viewers in its daytime screening and another million in its repeat broadcast in the evening when it outdid the new season of Homeland being released at the same time. Critical reception in America was also generally positive. The Washington Post called it “confounding, captivating and one of the most unsettling shows in years,” and the trade paper Variety characterized it as “a delicious conceit, balancing outlandishness with trenchancy.” It received two nominations for the Primetime Emmy Awards, one of them for Luca Bigazzi’s outstanding cinematography, and Jude Law’s performance was nominated for a Golden Globe. In Italy, the first two episodes shown at Venice received the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella Award, and after its complete airing, the series, in an unprecedented decision that breached the tradition of only awarding films, was given the Nastro d’argento for Film of the Year.

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Despite Sorrentino’s strenuous denials of any plans for a second season, in July 2018 there was confirmation that John Malkovich would be joining Jude Law in what was neither a sequel nor a continuation of The Young Pope but something of a follow-up to it, titled The New Pope. Sharon Stone and Marilyn Manson also play a part in the limited new series, which premiered at the 2019 Venice Festival.

Z ZA-LA-MORT. Character. Created by Emilio Ghione and modeled on the French mystery crime films of Victorin Jasset and Louis Feuillade, Za-laMort was a ruthless master criminal with a haggard face but a noble heart. Ghione appears to have derived the name from a battle cry intoned in Jasset’s Zigomar trilogy (1911–1913), meaning “Long Live Death.” The character’s first appearance was in Nelly la gigolette (Nelly, the Fast Girl, 1915), but Ghione went on to develop the persona through more than a dozen feature films as well as several multi-episode series. After 1915, Za was usually flanked by his faithful female sidekick, Za-la-Vie, played by Kelly Sambucini. Gaunt faced but photogenic and moving with feline grace, Ghione’s “sentimental Apache” threaded his way through loosely constructed serial plots that, although not always logical, held cinema audiences spellbound. A tough criminal, capable of violence and murder in the earlier films, Za became more of an investigator and defender of the law in the later ones. In Za-laMort contra Za-la-Mort (Za-la-Mort versus Za-la-Mort, 1922), Za is forced to track down a real thief who is impersonating him but whose crimes are soiling Za’s reputation. In one of the last films, Ultimissime della notte (Latest Night News, 1924), Za abandons his usual criminal attitude to take on the role of investigative journalist. By this time, however, Za’s popularity had begun to wane, and so the films were discontinued. One attempt to revive the character was made in 1947 by director Raffaello Matarazzo, Fumatori d’oppio o il ritorno di Za La Mort (The Opium Smokers or the Return of Za La Mort), which starred Ghione’s son, Emilio Jr. However, in a still war-scarred Italy striving to rebuild itself, the film attracted little attention, and Za-la-Mort’s return disappeared without a trace. ZALONE, CHECCO (1977–). Actor, stand-up comic, writer, musician, and singer-songwriter. Born Luca Pasquale Medici, Zalone graduated in jurisprudence from the University of Bari before embarking on a show business career by appearing in regional touring shows and on local television, adopting the playful stage-name of Checco Zalone. His career really took flight in 515

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2005 with regular appearances on the national TV variety show Zelig Off. A year later, he became something of a national hero by composing and recording “Siamo una squadra fortissimo” (We’re a Very Strong Team), a song that effectively became the unofficial national anthem of Italy as it made its way to victory in that year’s World Cup. At the same time, Zalone released a bestselling book-and-music album, Se non avrei fatto il cantande (If I Hadn’t Been a Singer). His film career began in earnest in 2009 when friend and fellow performer Gennaro Nunziante directed him in the semiautobiographical comedy Cado dalle nubi (Falling from the Skies, 2009). The film’s unexpected eye-bulging success at the box office led to Nunziante and Zalone teaming up to make Che bella giornata (What a Beautiful Day, 2011) and then Sole a catinelle (Sunshine By The Bucketload, 2013), with each comedy earning more than the previous. Their fourth feature together, Quo vado? (Where Am I Going?, 2016), a slight if rather irreverent and politically incorrect comedy featuring Zalone as an irksome 30-something public servant determined to hang on to his job for life at any cost, managed to do the impossible and topped the box office earnings of the three previous films. Cannily released during the Christmas season on close to 1,200 Italian screens, it earned most of what would be its more than 65 million euro in a few weeks, thus establishing itself as the highest-grossing Italian film of all time, easily overtaking the previous record holder, Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997). Given the film’s rather modest cinematic qualities, many astonished critics tried to fathom the reasons for its runaway success, with most attributing it to a widespread nostalgia in post-Berlusconi Italy for a past time when many Italians could count on a job for life. His fifth film, Tolo Tolo, which he not only wrote and starred in but also directed, was released in January 2020 and earned 46 million euros before cinemas closed due the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. ZAMPA, LUIGI (1905–1991). Director, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Coming from a poor background, Zampa began studying architecture and engineering at university but gravitated toward the theater and wrote a number of stage plays before enrolling at the newly formed Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Graduating from the Centro, he worked extensively as screenwriter on a host of the so-called white telephone films before directing his first feature, a playful theatrical comedy titled L’attore scomparso (The Actor Who Disappeared, 1941). This was followed by the historical costume drama Fra’ Diavolo (The Adventures of Fra Diavolo, 1942) and Un americano in vacanza (A Yank in Rome, 1946), a love story set in the context of the American liberation of Italy.

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In the immediate postwar period, Zampa achieved a great deal of popularity with a number of films that were regarded, especially outside Italy, as part of the Neorealist movement, in particular Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace, 1947), which was hugely successful both in Italy, where it won a Nastro d’argento for Best Story, and abroad, where it received, among others, the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film. Made in the same year, L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina, 1947), the story of a working-class woman who almost becomes a politician, similarly successful at the box office, was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival and earned its star, Anna Magnani, both the Volpi Cup and a Nastro d’argento for her feisty interpretation. There followed a fruitful collaboration between Zampa and Sicilian novelist Vitaliano Brancati, with Brancati adapting his own novels for Zampa’s Anni difficili (Difficult Years, 1948), Anni facili (Easy Years, 1953), and L’arte di arrangiarsi (The Art of Getting Along, 1955), biting satirical comedies that foregrounded the Italian knack for political and social compromise. During this time, Zampa also made what many regard as his most accomplished film, Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial, 1952), a dramatic revisiting of the Cuocolo murders and the struggle for control of Naples by the camorra in the early 1900s. Following Brancati’s untimely death, Zampa filmed an adaptation of Alberto Maravia’s novel La romana (Woman of Rome, 1954), with the screenplay written by Moravia himself, before going on to make a handful of only moderately successful films, which included Il magistrato (The Magistrate, 1959), Il vigile (The Traffic Policeman, 1960), and Anni ruggenti (Roaring Years, 1962). He achieved huge box office success again with Il medico della mutua (Be Sick! It’s Free, 1968), a satirical take on the Italian health care system starring Alberto Sordi, who by this stage had become a regular in Zampa’s films, and then, again with Sordi playing the lead, with Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia, 1971). Zampa continued to address contemporary social problems in a comic vein in Contestazione generale (Let’s Have a Riot, 1970), a satire on the student uprisings at the time that included stock footage of the student demonstrations. This was followed by Bisturi, la mafia bianca (Hospitals: The White Mafia, 1973), a caustic critique of corrupt doctors in the Italian medical system, and Gente di rispetto (The Flower in His Mouth, 1975), which took aim at the Mafia itself. After the psychological thriller Il mostro (The Monster, 1977) and Letti selvaggi (Tigers in Lipstick, 1979), an erotic escapade in eight episodes, Zampa retired from the cinema. In retirement, he published several novels, including Il primo giro della manovella (The First Take, 1980) and Pianeta nudo (Naked Planet, 1987).

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ZAVATTINI, CESARE (1902–1989). Novelist, screenwriter, and director. Having worked for many years as a journalist, a novelist, a painter, and a cultural organizer, in 1935 Zavattini also embraced the cinema by writing the story and screenplay for Mario Camerini’s Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935). He then worked on the screenplay of Alessandro Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942) before initiating what would be his very long and fruitful collaboration with Vittorio De Sica with his screenplay for I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944). In the immediate postwar period, he wrote, alone or in collaboration, the screenplays of many of the great Neorealist classics, and he became the most prominent theoretical voice of the Neorealist movement itself by championing the notion of cinema as a pedinamento (tailing or following) of everyday life in an unremitting search for truth. Although his theoretical ideas were often judged utopian and many of his projects frequently remained unrealized, he continued to be an important presence in Italian postwar culture and accrued an impressive list of screenwriting credits: he wrote or cowrote Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), Umberto D. (1952), La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1972), all for De Sica. He also collaborated again with Blasetti on Prima comunione (First Communion, 1950), with Luciano Emmer on Domenica d’agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), and with Luchino Visconti on Bellissima (1951). Widely respected both by his fellow writers and by the many filmmakers with whom he collaborated, he served for many years as the president of the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (National Film Writers’ Association). In 1976, he received the American Screenwriters Association Award and, in 1982, both the Luchino Visconti Award and a career Golden Lion at the Venice Festival. Curiously, for someone so involved in the production of so many films for so many years, he directed only one film of his own, La veritaaaà (The Truuuuth, 1981), a fairly transparent autobiographical work in which an energetic 80-year-old man escapes from his nursing home in order to exhort people in the street to think more independently and to realize themselves through social responsibility. ZEFFIRELLI, FRANCO (1923–2019). Art director, costume designer, and director of theater, opera, and film. Franco Zeffirelli (born Gianfranco Corsi Zeffirelli) became active in student theater while studying architecture at the University of Florence. In the immediate postwar period, he abandoned his architectural studies and embarked on a career as a theatrical set and costume designer, working onstage with Luchino Visconti before serving as one of the assistant directors on Visconti’s ill-fated La terra trema (The Earth

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Trembles, 1948). After serving a further apprenticeship with Visconti on Bellissima (1951) and Senso (The Wanton Contessa, 1954), Zeffirelli directed his first feature, the light comedy Camping (1957). After this foray into film, he returned to work extensively on the stage, designing and directing a number of acclaimed theatrical productions in London and New York. In 1962, he received the Tony Award for his design and direction of a muchlauded production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic in London.

Franco Zeffirelli directing Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in his Romeo and Juliet (1968). Courtesy of Photofest.

In the late 1960s, Zeffirelli achieved international renown for his innovative Shakespearean film adaptations, beginning in 1967 with a flamboyant version of The Taming of the Shrew that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, which attracted Oscar nominations for its art direction and costume design. A year later, he cast two unknown teenage actors in a youthful version of Romeo and Juliet that was again nominated for four Academy Awards, in the event winning Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, and, in Italy, receiving the David di Donatello for Best Director and five Nastri d’argento. He subsequently alternated between directing theater and opera onstage and films such as Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), but he also often managed to combine stage and screen, as in the filmed versions of La traviata (1982), Cavalleria rusticana (1982), and Otello (1986). In 1990, he returned to Shakespeare in a screen adaptation of Hamlet (1990), with Mel Gibson

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playing the title role. In the following years, he filmed a creditable adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1996), effectively re-created the Florence of his youth in Un tè con Mussolini (Tea with Mussolini, 1999), and created a sparkling homage to one of the greatest stage divas with whom he had most often worked in Callas Forever (2002). In 2004, having been elected to the Italian senate in the ranks of Forza Italia, Zeffirelli was recognized for his services to the performing arts in Britain with the award of an honorary British knighthood, the only Italian to ever be so honored. He subsequently concentrated mainly on directing operas for the stage while also appearing as himself in a number of documentaries. His last work was a spectacular new production of La traviata to be staged at the Arena Theater of Verona. Having passed away only a week before its scheduled premiere, he was honored on its opening night with the projection of an introductory video tribute recalling his long life and work, as well as an interminable standing ovation from an appreciative audience that included the president of the Republic and the minister for arts and culture. The production itself was carried live by the national broadcaster, RAI, who for the occasion also offered it free to all the other television networks. ZINGARETTI, LUCA (1961–). Actor. After graduating from the National Academy of Dramatic Art in 1984, where he had studied film and television direction with Andrea Camilleri, Zingaretti dedicated himself to the stage, working frequently with directors Luca Ronconi and Peter Stein. He made his first film appearance in 1987 in a small role in Giuliano Montaldo’s Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold Rimmed Glasses). In the 1990s, he began to appear in more significant roles in Marco Risi’s Il branco (The Pack, 1994), Ricky Tognazzi’s Vite strozzate (Strangled Lives, 1996), and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Tu ridi (You Laugh, 1998). Having by then fortuitously encountered the crime novels of his former teacher, Camilleri, featuring Police Commissioner Salvo Montalbano, he successfully struggled to be chosen to play the part of the grouchy Sicilian inspector in the first of what would be more than 30 screen adaptations of Montalbano’s exploits, financed and produced over the next two decades by the national broadcaster, RAI. Zingaretti’s subsequent career would thus involve a regular commitment, once or twice every year, to appear on the small screen as Commissioner Montalbano attempting to solve a new case. At the same time, as one of the most respected actors in the industry, he continued to work on the stage, in films, and on television in other roles. In 2005, he provided a very intense performance in two films directed by Roberto Faenza, Alla luce del sole (Come into the Light, 2005), where he played the priest Don Pirro Puglisi, murdered by the camorra in 1993, and I giorni dell’abbandono (The Days of Abandonment, 2005), the heartrending story of a marriage breakup, bringing him a nomination for the Nastro d’argento for both. In 2007, he was nominated

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for the Golden Ciak for his supporting role as Mario, the older friend who attracts Accio (Elio Germano) to the neo-Fascist cause, in Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child). A year later, while continuing to direct and act on the stage and appearing in four Montalbano adventures, he also played Osvaldo Valenti, a prominent film actor of the interwar years who in 1945 had been summarily excuted by partisans on suspicion of having been a Fascist collaborator, in Marco Tullio Giordana’s Sanguepazzo (Wild Blood, 2008). He subsequently appeared in strong supporting roles in Pupi Avati’s Il figlio più piccolo (The Youngest Son, 2010) and Mario Martone’s Risorgimento saga, Noi credevamo (We Believed, 2010) before returning to television to convincingly play the anti-Mafia campaigner Judge Paolo Borsellino, in Paolo Borsellino i 57 giorni (Paolo Borsellino—the 57 days, 2012). A year later, while again appearing in four Montalbano episodes and in the made-for-television biopic Adriano Olivetti—la forza di un sogno (Adriano Olivetti—the Power of a Dream, 2013), he also produced and acted in an Italian production of Ronald Hardwood’s play The Ivory Tower at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan. After an unusual foray into comedy in Angelo Longoni’s Maldamore (Love Pains, 2014) and several more stage productions, including an Italian adaptation of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride at the Piccolo Teatro Strehler (2016) and La sirena, adapted from a story by Giuseppe Tommaso Di Lampedusa at the Teatro delle Ali in Breno, Zingaretti returned to the big screen as the fearsome local gang boss, Angelo, in the D’Innocenzo brothers’ debut feature, La terra dell’abbastanza (Boys Cry, 2018). ZURLINI, VALERIO (1926–1982). Art critic, screenwriter, and director. After graduating in law from the University of Rome, Zurlini began his film career in the late 1940s with a series of short documentaries on urban life. His first feature, Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano, 1955), based on a novel by Vasco Pratolini, was the first of several fine adaptations of literary works that would mark his relatively short but distinguished film career, which would include Cronaca familiare (Family Portrait, 1962), for which he shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, and Le soldatesse (The Camp Followers, 1965), the adaptation of a wartime novel by Ugo Pirro. After a profound but melancholic exploration of the doomed nature of love in both Estate violenta (Violent Summer, 1959) and La ragazza con la valigia (Girl with a Suitcase, 1960), he made Seduto alla sua destra (Black Jesus, 1968), a fierce indictment of white colonialism in Africa but also a more general parable about man’s inhumanity to man. He returned to explore further the precarious nature of love and interpersonal relationships in what was perhaps his most personal film, La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer, 1972). Zurlini is probably best remembered, howev-

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er, for his final film, Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars, 1976), a delicately wrought and intellectually complex adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s existential novel of the same name.

French poster for Valerio Zurlini’s Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars, 1976). Courtesy of Photofest.

Appendix Winners at the Venice Festival and of the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’argento Prizes

VENICE FESTIVAL 1932 Public voting only. Best Director: Nikolai Ekk, Putjowka v zizn (The Road to Life) (USSR) Most Enjoyable Film: À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us), dir. René Clair (France) Most Original Fantasy Film: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, dir. Rouben Mamoulian (USA) Most Moving Film: The Sin of Madelon Claudet, dir. Edgar Selwyn (USA) Best Actress: Helen Hayes, The Sin of Madelon Claudet Best Actor: Fredric March, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1934 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Teresa Confalonieri (Loyalty of Love), dir. Guido Brignone Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Man of Aran, dir. Robert Flaherty (UK) Gold Medal, Best Actress: Katharine Hepburn, Little Women, dir. George Cukor (USA) Gold Medal, Best Actor: Wallace Beery, Viva Villa!, dir. Jack Conway (USA) 1935 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Casta diva, dir. Carmine Gallone Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Anna Karenina, dir. Clarence Brown (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Paula Wessely, Episode, dir. Walter Reisch (Austria) 523

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Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Pierre Blanchar, Crime et châtiment (Crime and Punishment), dir. Pierre Chenal (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Director: King Vidor, The Wedding Night (USA) 1936 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Lo squadrone bianco (White Squadron), dir. Augusto Genina Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Emperor of California), dir. Luis Trenker (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Annabella, Sacrifice d’honneur, dir. Marcel l’Herbier (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Paul Muni, The Story of Louis Pasteur, dir. William Dieterle (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Director: Jacques Feyder, La kermesse héroïque (Carnival in Flanders) (France) 1937 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal), dir. Carmine Gallone Prize for Best Foreign Film: Un carnet de bal (Christine), dir. Julien Duvivier (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Bette Davis, Kid Galahad, dir. Michael Curtiz (USA), and Marked Woman, dir. Lloyd Bacon (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Emil Jannings, Der Herrscher (The Ruler), dir. Veit Harlan (Germany) Prize for Best Director: Robert Flaherty and Zoltan Korda, Elephant Boy (UK) 1938 Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Olympia, dir. Leni Riefensthal (Germany); Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot), dir. Goffredo Alessandrini (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Norma Shearer, Marie Antoniette, dir. W. S. Van Dyke II (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Leslie Howard, Pygmalion, dir. Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard (UK) Best Director: Carl Froelich, Heimat (Homeland) (Germany)

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1939 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Abuna Messias (Cardinal Messias), dir. Goffredo Alessandrini Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Best Actress and Best Actor: not awarded 1940 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: L’assedio dell’Alcazar (The Siege of the Alcazar), dir. Augusto Genina Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Der Postmeister (The Stationmaster), dir. Gustav Ucicky (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Best Actress and Best Actor: not awarded 1941 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown), dir. Alessandro Blasetti Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Ohm Krüger, dir. Hans Steinhoff (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Luise Ullrich, Annelie, die Geschichte eines Lebens (Annelie), dir. Josef von Báky (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Ermete Zacconi, Don Buonaparte, dir. Flavio Calzavara (Italy) Gold Medal for Best Director: G. W. Pabst, Komödianten (The Comedians) 1942 Coppa Mussolini for Best Italian Film: Bengasi, dir. Augusto Genina Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film: Der große König (The Great King), dir. Veit Harlan (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Kristina Söderbaum, Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City), dir. Veit Harlan (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Fosco Giachetti, Bengasi 1943–1945 The festival suspended because of the war.

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1946 Best Film (selected by the Journalists’ Association): The Southerner, dir. Jean Renoir (USA) Coppa dell’ANICA: Paisà (Paisan), dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy) Prize of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia: Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry), dir. Aldo Vergano (Italy) 1947 Grand International Prize for Best Film: Siréna (The Strike), dir. Karel Steklý (Czechoslovakia) International Prize for Best Actress: Anna Magnani, L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina), dir. Luigi Zampa (Italy) International Prize for Best Actor: Pierre Fresnay, Monsieur Vincent, dir. Maurice Cloche (France) International Prize for Best Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Quai des Orfèvres (Jenny Lamour) (France) 1948 Grand International Prize for Best Film: Hamlet, dir. Laurence Olivier (UK) Prime Minister’s Prize for Best Italian Film: Sotto il sole di Roma (Under the Sun of Rome), dir. Renato Castellani International Prize for Best Actress: Jean Simmons, Hamlet International Prize for Best Actor: Ernst Deutsch, Der Prozess (The Trial), dir. George Wilhelm Pabst (Austria) International Prize for Best Director: G. W. Pabst, Der Prozess 1949 Leone di San Marco for Best Film: Manon, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot (France) Prime Minister’s Prize for Best Italian Film: Cielo sulla palude (Heaven over the Marshes), dir. Augusto Genina International Prize for Best Actress: Olivia de Havilland, The Snake Pit, dir. Anatole Litvak (USA) International Prize for Best Actor: Joseph Cotten, Portrait of Jennie, dir. William Dieterle (USA) International Prize for Best Director: Augusto Genina, Cielo sulla palude

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1950 Leone di San Marco: Justice est faite (Justice Is Done), dir. André Cayatte (France) Prime Minister’s Prize for Best Italian Film: Domani è troppo tardi (To morrow Is Too Late), dir. Léonide Moguy International Prize for Best Actress: Eleanor Parker, Caged, dir. John Cromwell (USA) International Prize for Best Actor: Sam Jaffe, The Asphalt Jungle, dir. John Huston (USA) Special Jury Prize: Cinderella, dir. Walt Disney (USA) 1951 Leone di San Marco: Rashômon, dir. Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Prime Minister’s Prize for Best Italian Film: La città si difende (Four Ways Out), dir. Pietro Germi Special Jury Prize: A Streetcar Named Desire, dir. Elia Kazan (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Jean Gabin, La nuit est mon royaume (The Night Is My Kingdom), dir. Georges Lacombe (France) International Prize: Ace in the Hole, dir. Billy Wilder (USA) 1952 Leone di San Marco: Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), dir. René Clément (France) International Prize: International Prize: Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu), dir. Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan); Europa ’51, dir. Roberto Rossellini Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Ingrid Bergman, Europa ‘51, dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Fredric March, Death of a Salesman, dir. Lásló Benedek (USA) 1953 Leone di San Marco: not awarded Leone d’argento: Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Ugetsu), dir. Kenji Mi zoguchi (Japan); I vitelloni, dir. Federico Fellini (Italy); Little Fugitive, dir. Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin (USA); Moulin Rouge, dir. John Huston (UK); Thérèse Raquin, dir. Marcel Carné (France); Sadko, dir. Aleksandr Ptushko (USSR)

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Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Lilli Palmer, The Fourposter, dir. Irving Reis (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Henri Vilbert, Le bon Dieu sans confession, dir. Claude Autant-Lara (France) 1954 Leone d’oro: Romeo and Juliet, dir. Renato Castellani (UK/Italy) Leone d’argento: Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai), dir. Akira Kurosawa (Japan); La strada, dir. Federico Fellini; On the Waterfront, dir. Elia Kazan (USA); Sanshō dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Jean Gabin, L’air de Paris (Air of Paris), dir. Marcel Carné (France/Italy); Touchez pas au grisbi (Grisbi), dir. Jacques Becker Absolute Grand Prize: The Back of Beyond, dir. John Heyer (Australia) 1955 Leone d’oro: Ordet (The Word), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark) Leone d’argento: Le amiche (The Girlfriends), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni; Ciske de rat (Ciske the Rat), dir. Wolfgang Staudte (Holland); Poprygun’ ja (The Grasshopper), dir. Samson Samsonov (USSR); The Big Knife, dir. Robert Aldrich (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Kenneth More, The Deep Blue Sea, dir. Anatole Litvak (UK); Curd Jürgens, Les héros sont fatigués (Heroes and Sinners), dir. Yves Ciampi (France / West Germany) 1956 Leone d’oro: not awarded Leone L’argento: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Maria Schell, Gervaise, dir. René Clément (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Bourvil, La traversée de Paris (Four Bags Full), dir. Claude Autant-Lara (France) Best Foreign Documentary: On the Bowery, dir. Lionel Rogosin (USA) 1957 Leone d’oro: Aparajito (The Unvanquished), dir. Satyajit Ray (India)

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Leone d’argento: Le notti bianche (White Nights), dir. Luchino Visconti (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Eva Marie Saint, A Hatful of Rain, dir. Fred Zinnemann (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Anthony Franciosa, A Hatful of Rain 1958 Leone d’oro: Muhōmatsu No Isshō (Muhōmatsu the Rickshaw Man), dir. Iroshi Inagaki (Japan) Special Jury Prize: Les amants (The Lovers), dir. Louis Malle (France); La sfida (The Challenge), dir. Francesco Rosi Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Sophia Loren, Black Orchid, dir. Martin Ritt (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Alec Guinness, The Horse’s Mouth, dir. Ronald Neame (UK) 1959 Leone d’oro: Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere), dir. Roberto Rossellini (Italy); La grande guerra (The Great War), dir. Mario Monicelli (Italy) Special Jury Prize: Ansiktet (The Magician), dir. Ingmar Bergman (Sweden) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Madeleine Robinson, À double tour (Leda), dir. Claude Chabrol (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: James Stewart, Anatomy of a Murder, dir. Otto Preminger (USA) 1960 Leone d’oro: Le passage du Rhin (Tomorrow Is My Turn), dir. André Cayatte (France) Special Prize: Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers), dir. Luchino Visconti (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Shirley MacLaine, The Apartment, dir. Billy Wilder (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: John Mills, Tunes of Glory, dir. Ronald Neame (UK)

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1961 Leone d’oro: L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), dir. Alain Resnais (France) Special Jury Prize: Mir Vchodyashchemu (Peace to Him Who Enters), dir. Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov (USSR) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Suzanne Flon, Tu ne tueras point (Thou Shalt Not Kill), dir. Claude Aurant-Lara (Liechtenstein) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Toshirō Mifune, Yojimbo, dir. Akira Kurosawa (Japan) 1962 Leone d’oro: Cronaca familiare (Family Portrait), dir. Valerio Zurlini (Italy); Ivanovo Detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood / My Name Is Ivan), dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR) Special Jury Prize: Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Emanuelle Riva, Thérèse Desqueyroux, dir. Georges Franju (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Burt Lancaster, Birdman of Alcatraz, dir. John Frankenheimer (USA) 1963 Leone d’oro: Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City), dir. Francesco Rosi (Italy) Special Jury Prize: Le feu follet (The Fire Within), dir. Louis Malle (France); Vstuplenie (Introduction), dir. Igor Talankin (USSR) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Delphine Seyrig, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the Time of Return), dir. Alain Resnais (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Albert Finney, Tom Jones, dir. Tony Richardson (UK) 1964 Leone d’oro: Deserto rosso (Red Desert), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy) Special Jury Prize: Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini; Gamlet (Hamlet), dir. Grigoriy Kozintsev (USSR) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Herriet Andersson, Att älska (To Love), dir. Jörn Donner (Sweden)

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Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Tom Courtenay, King and Country, dir. Joseph Losey (UK) 1965 Leone d’oro: Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra), dir. Luchino Visconti (Italy) Special Jury Prize: Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert), dir. Luis Buñuel (Mexico); Mne dvadtsat let (I Am Twenty), dir. Marlen Khutsiev (USSR); Modiga Mindre Män, dir. Leif Krantz (Sweden) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Annie Girardot, Trois chambres à Manhattan (Three Rooms in Manhattan), dir. Marcel Carné (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Toshirō Mifune, Akahige (Red Beard), dir. Akira Kurosawa (Japan) 1966 Leone d’oro: La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (Italy/Algeria) Special Jury Prize: Chappaqua, dir. Conrad Rooks (USA), Ahschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl), dir. Alexander Kluge (West Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Natalia Arinbasarova, Pervyy uchitel (The First Teacher), dir. Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (USSR) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Jacques Perrin, Un uomo a metá (Half a Man), dir. Vittorio De Seta (Italy) 1967 Leone d’oro: Belle de jour, dir. Luis Buñuel (France) Special Jury Prize: La Cina è vicina (China Is Near), dir. Marco Bellocchio (Italy); La chinoise, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Shirley Knight, Dutchman, dir. Anthony Harvey (UK) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Ljubisa Samardzic, Jutro (The Morning), dir. Purisa Djordjevic (Yugoslavia) 1968 Leone d’oro: Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (The Artist in the Circus Dome: Clueless), dir. Alexander Kluge (West Germany) Special Jury Prize: Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Our Lady of the Turks), dir. Carmelo Bene (Italy); Le Socrate (Socrates), dir. Robert Lapoujade (France)

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Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: John Marley, Faces, dir. John Cassavetes (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Laura Betti, Teorema (Theorem), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy) Pasinetti Award for Best Film: Faces 1969–1979 The festival is held, but films are not in competition, and no prizes are awarded. 1980 Leone d’oro: Atlantic City, dir. Louis Malle (Canada); Gloria, dir. John Cassavetes (USA) Special Jury Prize: 0 Megalèxandros (Alexander the Great), dir. Theo Angelopoulos (Greece/Italy) Best First Work: Ajándek ez a nap (A Priceless Day), dir. Péter Gothár (Hungary) FIPRESCI Prize: 0 Megalèxandros (Alexander the Great) OCIC Award: Voltati Eugenio (Eugenio), dir. Luigi Comencini (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Liv Ullman, Richard’s Things, dir. Anthony Harvey (UK) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: George Burns, Art Carney, Lee Strassberg, Going in Style, dir. Martin Brest (USA) 1981 Leone d’oro: Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane / The German Sis ters), dir. Margarethe von Trotta (West Germany) Special Jury Prize: Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams), dir. Nanni Moretti (Italy); Eles não usam black tie (They Don’t Wear Black Tie), dir. Leon Hirszman (Brazil) Best First Work: Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?), dir. Emir Kusturica (Serbia) New Cinema Award: Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane / The German Sis ters) FIPRESCI Prize: Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?) OCIC Award: Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane / The German Sis ters) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Prince of the City, dir. Sidney Lumet (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Lil Terselius, Forfølgelsen (The Witch Hunt), dir. Anja Breien (Norway/Sweden)

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Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Robert Duvall, True Confessions, dir. Ulu Grosbard (USA) 1982 Leone d’oro: Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things), dir. Wim Wenders (West Germany) Leone d’argento Best First Work: Sciopèn (Chopin), dir. Luciano Odorisio (Italy); De smaak van water (The Hes Case), dir. Orlow Seunke (Netherlands) Special Jury Prize: Imperativ (Imperative), dir. Krzysztof Zanussi (West Germany) FIPRESCI Prize: Agoniya (Rasputin), dir. Elem Klimov (Soviet Union); Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things) OCIC Award: Fünf letzte Tage (The Five Last Days), dir. Percy Adlon (West Germany) Best Actress: Susan Sarandon, Tempest, dir. Paul Mazursky (USA) Best Actor: Max Von Sydow, Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (Flight of the Eagle), dir. Jan Troell (Sweden / West Germany / Norway) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Alessandro Blasetti, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergej Jutkevic, Alexander Kluge, Akira Kurosawa, Michael Powell, Satyajit Ray, King Vidor, Cesare Zavattini, Luis Buñuel 1983 Leone d’oro: Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (France) Leone d’argento Best First Work: Rue cases nègres (Black Shack Alley), dir. Euzhan Palcy (France) Grand Special Jury Prize: Biquefarre, dir. Georges Rouquier (France) FIPRESCI Prize: Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander), dir. Ingmar Bergman (Sweden); Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Emotion), dir. Alexander Kluge (West Germany) OCIC Award: Rue cases nègres (Black Shack Alley) Best Actor: Matthew Modine, Michael Wright, Mitchell Lichtenstein, David Alan Grier, Guy Boyd, George Dundza, Streamers, dir. Robert Altman (USA) Best Actress: Darling Légitimus, Rue cases nègres (Black Shack Alley), dir. Euzhan Palcy (France) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Zelig, dir. Woody Allen (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Angela Winkler, Ediths Tagebook (Edith’s Diary), dir. Hans W. Geissendörfer (West Germany)

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Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Carlo Delle Piane, Una gita scolastica (A School Outing), dir. Pupi Avati (Italy) De Sica Award: Massimo Mazzucco, Summertime; Claudio Caligari, Amore tossico (Toxic Love) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Michelangelo Antonioni 1984 Leone d’oro: Rok Spokojnego Slonca (The Year of the Quiet Sun), dir. Krzysztof Zanussi (Poland) Leone d’argento Best First Work: Sonatine, dir. Micheline Lanctôt (Canada) Grand Special Jury Prize: Les favoris de la lune (Favorites of the Moon), dir. Otar Iosseliani (France) FIPRESCI Prize: Heimat: Eine Chronik in elf Teilen (Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany), dir. Edgar Reitz (West Germany) OCIC Award: Les favoris de la lune (Favorites of the Moon) Critics Week Award: Me’Ahorei Hasoragim (Beyond the Walls), dir. Uri Barbash (Israel) Best Actor: Nasceruddin Shah, Paar (The Crossing), dir. Goutam Ghosh (India) Best Actress: Pascale Ogier, Le nuits de la pleine lune (Full Moon in Paris), dir. Éric Rohmer (France) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Rok Spokojnego Slonca (The Year of the Quiet Sun) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Claudia Cardinale, Claretta, dir. Pasquale Squitieri (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Fernando Fernán Gómez, Los zancos (The Stilts), dir. Carlos Saura (Spain) De Sica Award: Francesca Comencini, Pianoforte 1985 Leone d’oro: Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), dir. Agnès Varda (France) Leone d’argento Best First Work: Dust, dir. Marion Hansel (Belgium) Grand Special Jury Prize: Tangos: El exilio de Gardel (Tangos: The Exile of Gardel), dir. Fernando E. Solanas (Argentina) Special Jury Prize: The Lightship, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski (USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) OCIC Award: Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) Critics Week Award: Yesterday, dir. Radoslaw Piwowarski (Poland) Best Actor: Gérard Depardieu, Police, dir. Maurice Pialat (France) Best Actress: not awarded

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Pasinetti Award Best Film: Prizzi’s Honor, dir, John Huston (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Barbara De Rossi, Mamma Ebe, dir. Carlo Lizzani (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Robert Duvall, The Lightship, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski (USA) De Sica Award: Nicola De Rinaldo, L’amara scienza (Bitter Science); Loredana Dordi, Fratelli (Brothers) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Federico Fellini Special Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Manoel de Oliveira, John Huston 1986 Leone d’oro: Le rayon vert (Summer), dir. Éric Rohmer (France) Leone d’argento Best First Work: La película del rey (A King and His Movie), dir. Carlos Sorin (Argentina) Grand Special Jury Prize: Chuzhaya, belaya i ryaboi (Wild Pigeon), dir. Sergei Soloviev (USSR); Storia d’amore (Story of Love), dir. Francesco Maselli (Italy) Special Jury Prize: X, dir. Oddvar Einarson (Norway) FIPRESCI Prize: Le rayon vert (Summer) Venice Authors Prize: Acta General de Chile, dir. Miguel Littin (Chile/ Cuba); Miss Mary, dir. María Luisa Bemberg (Argentina/USA) Best Actor: Carlo delle Piane, Regalo di Natale (Christmas Present), dir. Pupi Avati (Italy) Best Actress: Valeria Golino, Storia d’amore (Story of Love) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Round Midnight, dir. Bernard Tavernier (USA/France) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Marie Rivière, Le rayon vert (Summer) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Walter Chiari, Romance, dir. Massimo Mazzucco (Italy) De Sica Award: Attilio Concari 45º parallelo (45th Parallel) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani 1987 Leone d’oro: Au revoir les enfants, dir. Louis Malle (France) Leone d’argento: Lunga vita alla signora (Long Live the Lady!), dir. Ermanno Olmi (Italy); Maurice, dir. James Ivory (UK) Grand Special Jury Prize: Hip, Hip, Hurra!, dir. Kjell Grede (Sweden/ Denmark/Norway) Pasinetti Award Best Film: The Witches of Eastwick, dir. George Miller (USA)

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FIPRESCI Prize: Lunga vita alla signora (Long Live the Lady!); Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel), dir. Ömer Kavur (Turkey) OCIC Award: Au revoir les enfants President of the Italian Senate’s Gold Medal: Plyumbum, ili Opasnaya igra (Plumbum, or The Dangerous Game), dir. Vadim Abdrashitov (Soviet Union) Best Actress: Kang Soo-Yeon, Sibajî (The Surrogate Woman), dir. Kwon-Taek Im (South Korea) Pasinetti Award Best Actors: James Wilby and Hugh Grant, Maurice, dir. James Ivory (UK) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Gian Maria Volonté, Un ragazzo di Calabria (Run Boy, Run), dir. Luigi Comencini (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Melita Jurisic, The Tale of Ruby Rose, dir. Roger Scholes (Australia) Elvira Notari Prize: Melita Jurisic and Roger Scholes, The Tale of Ruby Rose Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Luigi Comencini, Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1988 Leone d’oro: La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker), dir. Ermanno Olmi (Italy) Leone d’argento: Topío stín omíhli (Landscape in the Mist), dir. Theo Angelopoulos (Greece) Grand Special Jury Prize: Camp de Thiaroye (The Camp at Thiaroye), dir. Sembène Ousmane and Thierno Faty Sow (Senegal) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Topío stín omíhli (Landscape in the Mist) FIPRESCI Prize: Topío stín omíhli (Landscape in the Mist); Tempos Difíceis (Hard Times), dir. João Botelho (Portugal/UK) OCIC Award: Topío stín omíhli (Landscape in the Mist); La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) President of the Italian Senate’s Gold Medal: Caro Gorbaciov (Dear Gorbachev), dir. Carlo Lizzani Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Ornella Muti, Codice privato (Secret Access), dir. Francesco Maselli Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Don Ameche, Things Change, dir. David Mamet (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert, Une affaire de femmes (Story of Women), dir. Claude Chabrol (France); Shirley MacLaine, Madame Souzatzka, dir. John Schlesinger (UK) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Don Ameche and Joe Mantegna, Things Change, dir. David Mamet (USA)

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Elvira Notari Prize: Francesco Maselli, Codice privato (Secret Access) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Joris Ivens 1989 Leone d’oro: Beiqing chengshi (City of Sadness), dir. Hou Xiaoxian (Taiwan) Leone d’argento: Recorda çoes da casa amarela (Recollections of the Yellow House), dir. João César Monteiro (Portugal); Sen no Rikyu (Death of a Tea Master), dir. Kei Kumai (Japan) Grand Special Jury Prize: Et la lumière fut (And Then There Was Light), dir. Otar Iosseliani (Germany/France) FIPRESCI Prize: Dekalog (The Decalogue), dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski (Poland / West Germany) OCIC Award: Che ora è? (What Time Is It?), dir. Ettore Scola (Italy) Critics Week: Un monde sans pitié (Love without Pity), dir. Eric Rochant (France) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Scugnizzi (Streetkids), dir. Nanni Loy (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: I Want to Go Home, dir. Alain Resnais (France) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Peggy Ashcroft, Screen One (UK) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Massimo Troisi, Che ora è? (What Time Is It?) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Peggy Ashcroft, Screen One Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Marcello Mastronianni, Massimo Troisi, Che ora è? (What Time Is It?) Elvira Notari Prize: Olga Narutskaya, Muzh i doch’ Tamary Aleksandrovny (Tamara Aleksandrovna’s Husband and Daughter) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Robert Bresson (France) 1990 Leone d’oro: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, dir. Tom Stoppard (UK) Leone d’argento for Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Goodfellas (USA) Grand Special Jury Prize: An Angel at My Table, dir. Jane Campion (New Zealand) FIPRESCI Prize: Mathilukal, dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan (India) OCIC Award: An Angel at My Table Critics Week: La discrète (The Discreet), dir. Christian Vincent (France); La stazione (The Station), dir. Sergio Rubini (Italy)

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President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Raspad (Collapse), dir. Mikhail Belikov (Soviet Union/USA) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, dir. James Ivory (UK) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Stefania Sandrelli, Die Rückkehr (The African Woman), dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Germany/Italy/France) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Richard Dreyfuss, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Gloria Munchmeyer, La luna en el espejo (The Moon in the Mirror), dir. Silvio Caiozzi (Chile) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Oleg Borisov, Edinstvenijat Svidetel (The Only Witness), dir. Michail Pandurski (Bulgaria) Elvira Notari Prize: Jane Campion, An Angel at My Table Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Miklós Jancsó, Marcello Mastroianni 1991 Leone d’oro: Urga (Close to Eden), dir. Nikita Mikhalkov (France/ USSR) Leone d’argento: Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern), dir. Zhang Yimou (China); J’entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar), dir. Philippe Garrel (France); The Fisher King, dir. Terry Gilliam (USA) Grand Special Jury Prize: A Divina Comédia (Divine Comedy), dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal/France) FIPRESCI Prize: Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern) OCIC Award: Urga (Close to Eden), dir. Nikita Mikhalov (Russia) Critics Week: Bar de rails (Railway Bar, dir. Cedric Kahn (France) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Allemagne 90 neuf zero (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (France) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Urga (Close to Eden) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Mercedes Ruehl, The Fisher King, Terry Gilliam (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Cerro Torre: Schrei aus Stein (Scream of Stone), dir. Werner Herzog Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Tilda Swinton, Edward II, dir. Derek Jarman (UK) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: River Phoenix, My Own Private Idaho, dir. Gus Van Sant (USA) Elvira Notari Prize: Yimou Zhang, Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern)

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Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Gian Maria Volonté, Mario Monicelli 1992 Leone d’oro: Qiu Ju da guan si (The Story of Qiu Ju), dir. Zhang Yimou (China) Leone d’argento: Hotel de Lux (Luxury Hotel), dir. Dan Pita (Romania); Jamón Jamón, dir. Juan José Bigas Luna (Spain); Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter), dir. Claude Sautet (France) Grand Special Jury Prize: Morte di un matematico napoletano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician), dir. Mario Martone (Italy) FIPRESCI Prize: Die Zweite Heimat: Chronik Einer Jugend (Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation), dir. Edgar Reitz (Germany/France/UK/ Sweden); Leon the Pig Farmer, dir. Vadim Jean, Gary Sinyor (UK); Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) OCIC Award: Orlando, dir. Sally Potter (UK/Russia/Italy/France/Netherlands) CICAE Award: La chasse aux papillons (Chasing Butterflies) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Guelwaar, dir. Ousmane Sembene (France/Germany/Senegal/USA) Pasinetti Award Best Film: La chasse aux papillons (Chasing Butterflies), dir. Otar Iosseliani (France/Italy/Germany) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Emmanuelle Béart, Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Carlo Cecchi, Morte di un matematico napoletano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Gong Li, Qiu Ju da guan si (The Story of Qiu Ju) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Jack Lemmon, Glengarry Glen Ross, dir. James Foley (USA) Elvira Notari Prize: Sally Potter, Orlando Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Francis Ford Coppola, Jeanne Moreau, Paolo Villaggio Special Prize on the Occasion of the Festival’s Jubilee: Die Zweite Heimat: Chronik Einer Jugend (Heimat 2: Chronicle of a Generation), dir. Edgar Reitz (Germany/France/UK/Sweden) 1993 Leone d’oro: Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue), dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski (France/Poland); Short Cuts, dir. Robert Altman (USA)

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Leone d’argento: Kosh ba kosh, dir. Bakhtiyar Khudojnazarov (Tajikistan) Grand Special Jury Prize: Bad Boy Bubby, dir. Rolf De Heer (Australia) FIPRESCI Prize: Bad Boy Bubby; Short Cuts; Le fils du requin (The Son of the Shark), dir. Agnès Merlet (Belgium/France/Luxembourg) OCIC Award: Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Za zui zi (Chatterbox), dir. Miaomiao Liu Pasinetti Award Best Film: Short Cuts Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Juliet Binoche, Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Un’anima divisa in due (A Soul Divided in Two), dir. Silvio Soldini (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Juliette Binoche, Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Un’anima divisa in due (A Soul Divided in Two), dir. Silvio Soldini (Italy) Special Coppa Volpi: Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Zane Cassidy, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Joseph C. Hopkins, Josette Maccario, Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr., Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Cassie Friel, Dustin Friel, Austin Friel, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Peter Gallagher, Jarrett Lennon, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, Huey Lewis, Danny Darst, for Short Cuts Elvira Notari Prize: Michelle Pfeiffer, Martin Scorsese, The Age of Innocence (USA) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Steven Spielberg, Claudia Cardinale, Robert De Niro, Roman Polanski 1994 Leone d’oro: Before the Rain, dir. Milcho Manchevski (UK/Macedonia); Aiqing Wansui (Vive l’amour), dir. Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan) Leone d’argento: Little Odessa, dir. James Gray (USA); Heavenly Creatures, dir. Peter Jackson (Germany / New Zealand / UK); Il toro (The Bull), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati (Italy) Special Grand Jury Prize: Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone (USA) Best Director: Gianni Amelio, Lamerica FIPRESCI Prize: Before the Rain; Aiqing Wansui (Vive l’amour) OCIC Award: Lamerica, dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy) CICAE Award: Lamerica

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President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Jirí Menzel, Zivot a neobycejna dobrodruzstvi vojaka Ivana Conkina (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin) (Czech Republic) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Lamerica, dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy/France/ Switzerland) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Juliette Lewis, Natural Born Killers Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Rade Serbedzija, Before the Rain Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Maria de Medeiros, Três Irmãos (Two Brothers, My Sister), dir. Teresa Villaverde (Portugal/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Xia Yu, Yangguang canlan de rizi (In the Heat of the Sun), dir. Jiang Wen (China / Hong Kong) Elvira Notari Prize: Teresa Villaverde, Três Irmãos (Two Brothers, My Sister) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Ken Loach, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Al Pacino 1995 Leone d’oro: Xich-lô (Cyclo), dir. Tran Ahn Hung (Vietnam/France) Grand Special Jury Prize: A Comédia de Deus (God’s Comedy), dir. Joao Cesar Monteiro (Portugal); L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy) FIPRESCI Prize: Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders (France/Germany/Italy); Xich-lô (Cyclo) OCIC Award: A hetedik szoba (The Seventh Room), dir. Márta Mészáros (Hungary/Italy) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Pasolini: Un delitto italiano (Pasolini: An Italian Crime), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: A comedia de deus (God’s Comedy), dir. João César Monteiro Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, La cérémonie, dir. Claude Chabrol (France/Germany) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Sergio Castellito, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, La cérémonie Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: George Göetz, Der Totmacher (Deathmaker), dir. Romuald Karmakar (Germany) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Woody Allen, Alain Resnais, Martin Scorsese, Giuseppe De Santis, Goffredo Lombardo, Ennio Morricone, Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti

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1996 Leone d’oro: Michael Collins, dir. Neil Jordan (Ireland/UK/USA) Special Grand Jury Prize: Brigands, chapitre VII (Brigands, Chapter VII), dir. Otar Iosseliani (France/Russia/Italy/Switzerland) Best First Work: Méfie-toi de l’eau qui dort (Still Waters Run Deep), dir. Jacques Deschamps (France) FIPRESCI Prize: Ponette, dir. Jacques Doillon (France); L’âge des possibles (The Age of Potential), dir. Pascale Ferran (France); De jurk (The Dress), dir. Alex van Warmerdam (Netherlands) OCIC Award: Ponette ; The Funeral, dir. Abel Ferrara (USA) FEDIC Award: Voci nel tempo, dir. Franco Piavoli (Italy) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Carla’s Song, dir. Ken Loach (UK/ Spain/Germany) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Portrait of a Lady, dir. Jane Campion (UK/ USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Tereza Groszmannová, Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Pianese Nunzio, 14 anni a maggio (Sacred Silence), dir. Antonio Capuano (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Victoire Thivisol, Ponette Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Liam Neeson, Michael Collins Elvira Notari Prize: Monica Pellizzari, A Fist Full of Flies (Australia) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Vittorio Gassman, Michele Morgan, Robert Altman, Dustin Hoffman 1997 Leone d’oro: Hana-Bi (Fireworks), dir. Takeshi Kitano (Japan) Grand Special Jury Prize: Ovosodo (Hardboiled Egg), dir. Paolo Virzì (Italy) FIPRESCI Prize: Historie milosne (Love Stories), dir. Jerzy Stuhr (Poland); TwentyFourSeven, dir. Shane Meadows (UK) OCIC Award: The Winter Guest, dir. Alan Rickman (UK/USA) FEDIC Award: Tano da morire (To Die for Tano), dir. Roberta Torre (Italy) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Vor (The Thief), dir. Pavel Chukhray, (Russia/France) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Giro di lune tra terra e mare (Round the Moons between Earth and Sea), dir. Giuseppe M. Gaudino (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Emma Thompson, The Winter Guest, dir. Alan Rickman (UK/USA)

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Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Edoardo Gabbriellini, Ovosodo (Hardboiled Egg) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Robin Tunney, Niagara Niagara, dir. Bob Gosse (USA/Canada) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Wesley Snipes, One Night Stand, dir. Mike Figgis (USA) Elvira Notari Prize: Nouri Bouzid, Amel Hedhili, Nadia Kaci, Leila Nassim, Bent Familia, dir. Nouri Bouzid Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Gérard Depardieu, Stanley Kubrick, Alida Valli 1998 Leone d’oro: Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed), dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy) Leone d’argento: Crna macka, beli macor (Black Cat, White Cat), dir. Emir Kusturica, (Germany/Serbia/France) Grand Special Jury Prize: Terminus paradis (Next Stop Paradise), dir. Lucian Pintilie (France/Romania) Best First Work: Vivre au paradis (Living in Paradise), dir. Bourlem Guerdjou (France/Algeria/Belgium/Norway) FIPRESCI Prize: Bure baruta (Cabaret Balkan), dir. Goran Paskaljevic (Serbia) OCIC Award: L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon), dir. Francesca Archibugi (Italy) FEDIC Award: Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love), dir. Michele Placido (Italy) President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: Sokout (The Silence), dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iran/Tajikistan/France) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Kim Rossi Stuart, I giardini dell’Eden (The Garden of Eden), dir. Alessandro D’Alatri Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Catherine Deneuve, Place Vendôme, dir. Nicole Garcia (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Sean Penn, Hurlyburly, dir. Anthony Drazan (USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Niccolò Senni, L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon Elvira Notari Prize: Vera Chytilová, Pasti, pasti, pasticky (Traps), dir. Vera Chytilová (Czech Republic) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Sophia Loren, Andrzej Wajda, Warren Beatty

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1999 Leone d’oro: Yi ge dou bu neng shao (Not One Less), dir. Zhang Yimou (China) Grand Special Jury Prize: Bad ma ra khahad bard (The Wind Will Carry Us), dir. Abbas Kiarostami (France/Iran) Special Prize for Directing: Zhang Yuan, Guo Nian Hui Jia (Seventeen Years) (China/Italy) Leone d’argento Short Film: Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, dir. Teboho Mahlatsi FIPRESCI Prize: Bad ma ra khahad bard (The Wind Will Carry Us) OCIC Award: Jesus’ Son, dir. Alison Maclean (Canada/USA) FEDIC Award: Il dolce rumore della vita (Sweet Sound of Life), dir. Giuseppe Bertolucci (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Un uomo perbene, dir. Maurizio Zaccaro (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress:Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Rien à faire (Empty Days), dir. Marion Vernoux (France) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Sergi López, Une liaison pornographique (An Affair of Love), dir. Frédéric Fonteyne Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Nathalie Baye, Une liaison pornographique (An Affair of Love) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Jim Broadbent, Topsy-Turvy, dir. Mike Leigh (UK) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Nina Proll, Nordrand (Northern Skirts), dir. Barbara Albert (Austria/Germany) Elvira Notari Prize: Kate Winslet, Jane Campion, Holy Smoke, dir. Jane Campion Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Jerry Lewis 2000 Leone d’oro: Dayereh (The Circle), dir. Jafar Panahi (Iran/Italy) Grand Special Jury Prize: Before Night Falls, dir. Julian Schnabel (USA) Special Prize for Directing: Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Uttara (The Wrestlers) (India) Leone d’argento Short Film: A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow, dir. Peter Long (Australia) FIPRESCI Prize: Dayereh (The Circle) FIPRESCI Prize Best First Feature: Thomas est amoureux (Thomas in Love), dir. Pierre-Paul Renders (Belgium/France) OCIC Award: Liam, dir. Stephen Frears (UK/Italy/France/Germany) FEDIC Award: Placido Rizzotto, dir. Pasquale Scimeca (Italy)

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President of the Senate’s Gold Medal: La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins), dir. Barbet Schroeder Pasinetti Award Best Film: I cento passi (One Hundred Steps), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Nargess Mamizadeh, Maryiam Palvin Almani, Mojgan Faramarzi, Elham Saboktakin, Monir Arab, Maedeh Tahmasebi, Maryam Shayegan, Khadijeh Moradi, Negar Ghadyani, Solmaz Panahi, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Fatemeh Naghavi, Dayereh (The Circle) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Antonio Albanese, La lingua del santo (Holy Tongue), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Rose Byrne, The Goddess of 1967, dir. Clara Law (Australia) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Javier Bardem, Before Night Falls Marcello Mastronianni Award: Liam, dir. Megan Burns (UK/Germany/ France/Italy) Elvira Notari Prize: not awarded Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Clint Eastwood 2001 Leone d’oro: Monsoon Wedding, dir. Mira Nair (India) Grand Jury Prize: Hundstage (Dog Days), dir. Ulrich Seidl (Austria) Leone d’argento for Best Director: Babak Payami, Raye Makhfi (Secret Ballot), (Italy/Iran) Leone d’argento Short Film: Freunde (The Whiz Kids), dir. Jan Krüger (Germany) Cinema of the Present—Lion of the Year: Haixian (Seafood), dir. Kate Zhu (China / Hong Kong) Cinema of the Present—Special Jury Award: Le souffle (Deep Breath), dir. Damien Odoul (France) FIPRESCI Prize: Sauvage innocence (Wild Innocence), dir. Philippe Garrel (France/Netherlands) OCIC Award: Raye makhfi (Secret Ballot), dir. Babak Payami (Iran/Italy) FEDIC Award: Tornando a casa (Sailing Home), dir. Vincenzo Marra (Italy) Audience Award—Best Film: Marisa Romanov, dir. Miranda K. Spigener (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Babak Payami, Raye makhfi (Secret Ballot), dir. Babk Payami (Italy/Iran) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Sandra Ceccarelli, Luce dei miei occhi Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Luigi Lo Cascio, Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes), dir. Giuseppe Piccioni (Italy)

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Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Sandra Ceccarelli, Luce dei miei occhi Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Luigi Lo Cascio, Luce dei miei occhi (Light of My Eyes) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Y tu mamá también, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (Mexico) Elvira Notari Prize: Yu Li, Jin nian xia tian (Fish and Elephant), dir. Yu Li (China) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Éric Rohmer 2002 Leone d’oro: The Magdalene Sisters, dir. Peter Mullan (UK/Ireland) Grand Jury Prize: Dam durakov (House of Fools), dir. Andrei Konchalovsky (Russia/France) Special Prize for Directing: Chang-dong Lee, Oasiseu (Oasis) (South Korea) Leone d’argento Short Film: Clown, dir. Irina Evteev (Russia) FIPRESCI Prize: Oasiseu (Oasis), dir. Chang-dong Lee (South Korea) FIPRESCI Prize Best Short Film: 11’09’’01 (September 11), dir. Ken Loach (UK) FEDIC Award: Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity), dir. Daniele Vicari (Italy) Audience Award—Best Film: L’homme du train (Man on the Train, dir. Patrice Leconte (France/UK/Germany/Japan) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity), dir. Daniele Vicari (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: not awarded Pasinetti Award Best Actress: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Julianne Moore, Far from Heaven, dir. Todd Haynes (USA/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Stefano Accorsi, Un viaggio chiamato amore (A Journey Called Love), dir. Michele Placido (Italy) Marcello Mastroianni Award: So-Ri Moon, Oasiseu (Oasis) Elvira Notari Prize: not awarded Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Dino Risi 2003 Leone d’oro: Vozvrascenie (The Return), dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev (Russia) Leone d’argento: Zatōichi (The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi), dir. Takeshi Kitano (Japan)

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Grand Special Jury Prize: Le cerf-volant (The Kite), dir. Randa Chahal Sabbag (Lebanon/France) Special Prize for Directing, Leone d’argento: Takeshi Kitano, Zatoichi (The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) Leone d’argento Short Film: Neft (The Oil), dir. Murad Ibragimbekov (Russia) FIPRESCI Prize: Bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn), dir. Ming-liang Tsai (Taiwan) FEDIC Award: Il miracolo (The Miracle), dir. Edoardo Winspeare Audience Award—Best Film: Zatôichi (The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) Special Pasinetti Award: L’acqua . . . il fuoco (The Water . . . the Fire), dir. Luciano Emmer (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: not awarded Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Maya Sansa, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Roberto Herlitzka, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), dir. Marco Bellocchio (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Katja Riemann, Rosenstrasse (The Women of Rosenstrasse), dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Germany) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Sean Penn, 21 Grams, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu (USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Najat Benssallem, Raja, dir. Jacques Doillon (Morocco/France) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Dino De Laurentiis, Omar Sharif 2004 Leone d’oro: Vera Drake, dir. Mike Leigh (UK) Leone d’argento: Bin-jip (3-Iron), dir. Ki-duk Kim (South Korea) Grand Jury Prize, Leone d’argento: Mar adentro (The Sea Inside), dir. Alejandro Amenábar (Spain) Special Prize for Directing, Leone d’argento: Kim Ki-duk, Bin jip (3Iron) Leone d’argento Short Film: Signe d’appartenance, dir. Kamel Cherif (Belgium/France/Tunisia) FIPRESCI Prize: Bin-jip (3-Iron) FEDIC Award: Volevo solo dormirle addosso (To Sleep Next to Her), dir. Eugenio Cappuccio (Italy) CICAE Award: La femme de Gilles (Gilles’ Wife), dir. Frédéric Fonteyne (France/Belgium) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Les petits fils (The Grand Sons), dir. Ilan Duran Cohen (France)

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Audience Award (Critics Week): Ve’Lakhta Lehe Isha (To Take a Wife), dir. Ronit Elkabetz, Shlomi Elkabetz (Israel/France) Special Pasinetti Award: Vento di terra, Vincenzo Marra (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, 5x2, dir. François Ozon (France) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Kim Rossi Stuart, Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Javier Bardem, Mar adentro Marcello Mastroianni Award: Marco Luisi, Tommaso Ramenghi, Lavorare con lentezza (Working Slowly), dir. Guido Chiesa (Italy) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Manoel de Oliveira, Stanley Donen 2005 Leone d’oro: Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee (USA) Leone d’argento: Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers), dir. Philippe Garrel (France) Grand Special Jury Prize: Mary, dir. Abel Ferrara (Italy/France/USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Good Night, and Good Luck, dir. George Clooney (USA) FEDIC Award: Mater natura, dir. Massimo Andrei (Italy) CICAE Award: Hong yan (Dam Street), dir. Yu Li (China/France) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: East of Paradise, dir. Lech Kowalski (France) Venice Horizons Documentary Award: Pervye na Lune (First on the Moon), dir. Aleksey Fedorchenko (Russia) Audience Award—Best Film: Love, dir. Vladan Nikolic (USA/Serbia/ Montenegro) Doc/It Award: East of Paradise, dir. Lech Kowalski (France); La dignidad de los nadies (The Dignity of the Nobodies), dir. Fernando E. Solanas (Argentina/Brazil) Pasinetti Award (Authors’ Days): Elio Petri . . . appunti su un autore, (Elio Petri . . . Notes on an Author), dir. Federico Bacci, Stefano Leone, Nicola Guarneri (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: not awarded Pasinetti Award Best Actor: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, La bestia nel cuore (The Beast in the Heart / Don’t Tell), dir. Cristina Comencini (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck

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Marcello Mastroianni Award: Ménothy Cesar, Vers le sud (Heading South), dir. Laurent Cantet (France/Canada) Special Lion: Isabelle Huppert Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Hayao Miyazaki, Stefania Sandrelli 2006 Leone d’oro: San xia hao ren (Still Life), dir. Jia Zhangke (China / Hong Kong) Leone d’argento: Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places), dir. Alain Resnais (France/Italy) Special Jury Prize: Daratt (Dry Season), dir. Mahamat Saleh Haroun (Chad/France/Belgium/Austria) FIPRESCI Prize: The Queen, dir. Stephen Frears (UK/USA) FEDIC Award: Nuovomondo (Golden Door), dir. Emanuele Crialese (Italy/France) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Ma bei shang de fa ting (Courthouse on Horseback), dir. Jie Liu (China) Venice Horizons Documentary Award: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, dir. Spike Lee (USA) Critics Week Award: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, dir. Dito Montiel (USA) Doc/It Award: Ana alati tahmol azouhour ila qabriha (I Am the One Who Puts Flowers on Her Grave), dir. Hala Abdallah, Ammar Al Beik (Syria/France); Dong, dir. Zhangke Jia (Hong Kong / China) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Sergio Castellitto, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star), dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy/Switzerland/France/Singapore) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Laura Morante, Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Nuovomondo (Golden Door), dir. Emanuele Crialese (Italy/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen, dir. Stephen Frears Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Ben Affleck, Hollywoodland, dir. Allen Coulter (USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Isild Le Besco, L’intouchable (The Untouchable), dir. Benoît Jacquot (France) Special Lion: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: David Lynch

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2007 Leone d’oro: Se, jie (Lust, Caution), dir. Ang Lee (USA/Taiwan) Leone d’argento: Redacted, dir. Brian De Palma (USA) Special Jury Prize: La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain), dir. Abdellatif Kechiche (France); I’m Not There, dir. Todd Haynes (USA) Queer Lion: The Speed of Life, dir. Ed Radtke (USA) FIPRESCI Prize: La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) FEDIC Award: Non Pensarci (Don’t Think about It), dir. Gianni Zanasi (Italy) CICAE Award: Geomen tangyi sonyeo oi (With the Girl of Black Soil), dir. Soo-il Jeon (South Korea / France) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Sügisball (Autumn Ball), dir. Veiko Õunpuu (Estonia) Venice Horizons Documentary Award: Wuyong, dir. Zhangke Jia (China) Doc/It Award: L’aimée (The Beloved), dir. Arnaud Desplech (France) Critics Week Award: Zui yao yuan de ju li (The Most Distant Course), dir. Jing-Jie Lin Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Valeria Solarino, Valzer, dir. Salvatore Maira (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Toni Servillo, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake), dir. Andrea Molaioli (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Brad Pitt, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, dir. Andrew Dominik (USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Hafsia Herzi, La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Tim Burton Leone d’oro for the Festival’s 75th Anniversary: Bernardo Bertolucci 2008 Leone d’oro: The Wrestler, dir. Darren Aronofsky (USA) Leone d’argento: Bumazhnyy Soldat (Paper Soldier), dir. Aleksei German (Russia/Netherlands) Special Jury Prize: Teza (Morning Dew), dir. Haile Gerima (Ethopia/ Germany/France) Queer Lion: Un altro pianeta (One Day in a Life), dir. Stefano Tummolini Leone d’argento Short Film: Lögner (Lies), dir. Jonas Odell (Sweden) FIPRESCI Prize: Gabbla, dir. Tariq Teguia (Algeria/France) FEDIC Award: Machan, dir. Uberto Pasolini (Sri Lanka / Italy)

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Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Melancholi a, dir. Lav Diaz (Philippines) Venice Horizons Documentary Award: Below Sea Level, dir. Gianfranco Rosi (USA/Italy) Doc/It Award: Below Sea Level International Critics’ Week Award: L’apprenti (The Apprentice), dir. Samuel Collardey (France) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Pranzo di Ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch), dir. Gianni Di Gregori Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Isabella Ferrari, Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Silvio Orlando, Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father), dir. Pupi Avati (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Dominique Blanc, L’autre (The Other One), dir. Patrick-Mario Bernard (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Silvio Orlando, Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father), dir. Pupi Avati (Italy) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Jennifer Lawrence, The Burning Plain, dir. Guillermo Arriaga (USA/Mexico) Special Lion: Werner Schroeter Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Ermanno Olmi 2009 Leone d’oro: Lebanon, dir. Samuel Maoz (Israel/France/Germany) Leone d’argento: Zanan-e bedun-e mardan (Women without Men), dir. Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (Germany/Austria/France/Italy/Morocco) Special Jury Prize: Soul Kitchen, dir. Fatih Akin (Germany/France/Italy) Queer Lion: A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Lourdes, dir. Jessica Hausner (France/Austria) FEDIC Award: Lo spazio bianco, dir. Francesca Comencini (Italy) Venice Horizons Award: Engkwentro (Clash), dir. Pepe Diokno (Philippines) Venice Horizons Documentary Award: 1428, dir. Haibin Du (China) International Critics’ Week Award: Tehroun, dir. Nader T. Homayoun (Iran/France) Controcampo Italiano Prize: Cosmonauta (Cosmonaut), dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli (Italy) 3-D Award: The Hole, dir. Joe Dante (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, Baarìa Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Filippo Timi, La doppia ora (The Double Hour), dir. Giuseppe Capotondi (Italy)

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Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Margherita Buy, Lo spazio bianco (The White Space), dir. Francesca Comencini (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Ksenia Rappaport, La doppia ora (The Double Hour), dir. Giuseppe Capotondi (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Colin Firth, A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Jasmine Trinca, Il grande sogno (The Big Dream), dir. Michele Placido (Italy) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: John Lasseter and the Disney Pixar directors 2010 Leone d’oro: Somewhere, dir. Sofia Coppola (USA) Leone d’argento: Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus), dir. Álex de la Iglesia, (Spain/France) Special Jury Prize: Essential Killing, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski (Poland/ France) Queer Lion: En el futuro (In the Future), dir. Mauro Andrizzi (Argentina) FIPRESCI Prize: Ovsyanki (Silent Souls), dir. Aleksey Fedorchenko (Russia) FEDIC Award: L’amore buio (Dark Love), dir. Antonio Capuano CICAE Award: La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty), dir. Catherine Breillat (France) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Verano de Goliat (Summer of Goliath), dir. Nicolás Pereda (Canada/Mexico/Netherlands) International Critics’ Week Award: Svinalängorna (Beyond), dir. Pernilla August (Sweden/Finland/Denmark) Controcampo Italiano Prize: 20 sigarette (20 Cigarettes), dir. Aureliano Amadei (Italy) Award of the City of Venice: Pumzi, dir. Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya / South Africa) 3-D Award: Avatar, dir. James Cameron (USA); How to Train Your Dragon, dir. Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois (USA) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: not awarded Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), dir. Saverio Costanzo (Italy/ Germany/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Ariane Labed, Attenberg, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari (Greece) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Vincent Gallo, Essential Killing Marcello Mastroianni Award: Mila Kunis, Black Swan, dir. Darren Aronofsky (USA)

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Special Lion: Monte Hellman Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: John Woo 2011 Leone d’oro: Faust, dir. Aleksander Sokurov (Russia) Leone d’argento: Shangjun Cai, Ren shan ren hai (People Mountain People Sea) Special Jury Prize: Terraferma, dir. Emanuele Crialese (Italy/France) (China / Hong Kong) Queer Lion: Wilde Salomé, dir. Al Pacino (USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Shame, dir. Steve McQueen (UK) FEDIC Award: Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet), dir. Andrea Segre (Italy/France) CICAE Award: O le tulafale (The Orator), dir. Tusi Tamasese (New Zealand / Samoa) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Kotoko, dir. Shin’ya Tsukamoto (Japan) 3-D Award: Spell: The Hypnotist Dog, dir. Nadia Ranocchi, David Zamagni (Italy) Controcampo Italiano Prize—Documentary: Pugni chiusi, dir. Fiorella Infascelli (Italy) Controcapo Italiano Prize—Short Film: A Chjàna (The Plain), dir. Jonas Carpignano (Italy/USA) International Critics’ Week Award: La terre outragée (Land of Oblivion), dir. Michale Boganim (France/Ukraine/Poland/Germany) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Terraferma Pasinetti Award Best Actor: not awarded Pasinetti Award Best Actress: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Deanie Yip, Tou ze (A Simple Life), dir. Ann Hui (China / Hong Kong) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Michael Fassbender, Shame, dir. Steve McQueen (UK) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Shôta Sometani, Fumi Nikaidô, Himizu, dir. Sion Sono (Japan) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Marco Bellocchio 2012 Leone d’oro: Pieta, dir. Kim Ki-duk (South Korea) Leone d’argento: The Master, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (USA) Special Jury Prize: Paradies: Glaube (Paradise: Faith), dir. Ulrich Seidl (Austria/Germany/France)

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Queer Lion: Muge (The Weight), dir. Kyu-hwan Jeon (South Korea) FIPRESCI Prize: The Master CICAE Award: Wadjda, dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour (Saudi Arabia) FEDIC Award: L’intervallo (The Interval), dir. Leonardo di Costanzo Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Tango libre, Frédéric Fonteyne (France/Belgium) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: San zimei (Three Sisters), dir. Bing Wang (Hong Kong / France) International Critics’ Week Award: Äta sova dö (Eat Sleep Die), dir. Gabriela Pichler (Sweden) Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Äta sova dö (Eat Sleep Die) Bresson Award: Ken Loach Pasinetti Special Award: Clarisse, dir. Liliana Cavani (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Valerio Mastandrea, Gli equilibristi (Balancing Act), dir. Ivano De Matteo (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: not awarded Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Hadas Yaron, Lemale Et Ha’halal (Fill the Void), dir. Rama Burshtein (Israel) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, The Master Marcello Mastroianni Award: Fabrizio Falco, Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty), dir. Marco Bellocchio (Italy); Fabrizio Falco, È stato il figlio (It Was the Son), dir. Daniele Ciprì (Italy) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Francesco Rosi 2013 Leone d’oro: Sacro GRA, dir. Gianfranco Rosi (Italy/France) Leone d’argento for Best Director: Alexandros Avranas, Miss Violence (Greece) Grand Special Jury Prize: Jiao you (Stray Dogs), dir. Tsai Ming Liang (Taiwan/France) Special Jury Prize: Die Frau des Polizisten (The Policeman’s Wife), dir. Philip Gröning (Germany) Queer Lion: Philomena, dir. Stephen Frears (UK/USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm), dir. Xavier Dolan (France/Canada) FEDIC Award: Zoran, il mio nipote scemo (Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot), dir. Matteo Oleotto (Italy/Slovenia) CICAE Award: Still Life, dir. Uberto Pasolini (Italy) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Ruin, dir. Michael Cody, Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Australia)

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Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Eastern Boys, dir. Robin Campillo (France) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Uberto Pasolini, Still Life Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Zoran, il mio nipote scemo (Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Antonio Albanese, L’intrepido, dir. Gianni Amelio (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, Elena Cotta, Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo), dir. Emma Dante (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Elena Cotta, Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo), dir. Emma Dante (Italy/Switzerland/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Themis Panou, Miss Violence Marcello Mastroianni Award: Tye Sheridan, Joe, dir. David Gordon Green (USA) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: William Friedkin 2014 Leone d’oro: En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence), dir. Roy Andersson (Sweden/Germany/Norway/France) Leone d’argento: Belye nochi pochtalyona Alekseya Tryapitsyna (The Postman’s White Nights), dir. Andrey Konchalovskiy (Russia) Grand Special Jury Prize: The Look of Silence, dir. Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark/Indonesia/France/Germany/USA) Special Jury Prize: Sivas, dir. Kaan Müjdeci (Germany/Turkey) Queer Lion: Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights), dir. Mario Fanfani (France) FIPRESCI Prize: The Look of Silence FEDIC Award: Io sto con la sposa (On the Bride’s Side), dir. Antonio Augugliaro, Gabriele del Grande, Khaled Soliman al Nassiry (Italy) CICAE Award: Heaven Knows What, dir. Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie (USA) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Naji Abu Nowar, Theeb (United Arab Emirates) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Court, dir. Chaitanya Tamhane (India) Venice Horizons Award Best Short Film: Maryam, dir. Sidi Saleh (Indonesia) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Belluscone: Una storia siciliana, dir. Franco Maresco (Italy) Venice Days Award: Retour à Ithaque (Return to Ithaca), dir. Laurent Cantet (France/Belgium)

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Orizzonti and International Critics’ Week: Nicije dete (No One’s Child), dir. Vuk Rsumovic (Serbia/Croatia) Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Nicije dete (No One’s Child) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Anime nere (Black Souls), dir. Francesco Munzi (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Elio Germano, Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi), dir. Mario Martone (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, Hungry Hearts, dir. Saverio Costanzo (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, Hungry Hearts Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Adam Driver, Hungry Hearts Marcello Mastroianni Award: Romain Paul, Le dernier coup de marteau (The Last Hammer Blow), dir. Alix Delaporte (France) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Frederick Wiseman, Thelma Schoonmaker 2015 Leone d’oro: Desde allá (From Afar), dir. Lorenzo Vigas (Venezuela/ Mexico) Leone d’argento: El Clan (The Clan), dir. Pablo Trapero (Argentina/ Spain) Grand Special Jury Prize: Anomalisa, dir. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson (USA) Special Jury Prize: Abluka (Frenzy), dir. Emin Alper (France/Turkey) Queer Lion: The Danish Girl, dir.Tom Hooper (USA/UK) FIPRESCI Prize: Sangue del mio sangue (Blood of My Blood), dir. Marco Bellocchio (Italy) FEDIC Award: Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad), dir. Claudio Caligari (Italy) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Boi Neon (Neon Bull), dir. Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil/Uruguay) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Brady Corbet, The Childhood of a Leader (USA/Canada) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Free in Deed, Jake Mahaffy (New Zealand / USA) Venice Horizons Award Best Short Film: Belladonna, dir. Dubravka Turic (Croatia) Venice Days Best Film: Underground Fragrance, dir. Peng Fei Song (France/China) Venice Classici Award Best Documentary on Cinema: The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin, dir. Yves Montmayeur (France/USA)

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Venice Classici Award Best Restored Film: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini International Critics’ Week Award: Tanna, dir. Bentley Dean, Martin Butler (Australia) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Luca Marinelli, Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Valeria Golino, Per amor vostro (Anna), dir. Giuseppe M. Gaudino (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Valeria Golino, Per amor vostro (Anna), dir. Giuseppe M. Gaudino (Italy/France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Fabrice Luchini, L’hermine (Courted), dir. Christian Vincent (France) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Abraham Attah, Beasts of No Nation, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga (USA) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Bertrand Tavernier 2016 Leone d’oro: Ang babaeng humayo (The Woman Who Left), dir. Lav Diaz (Philippines) Leone d’argento: La región salvaje (The Untamed), dir. Amat Escalante (Mexico/France) Grand Jury Prize: Nocturnal Animals, dir. Tom Ford (USA) Special Jury Prize: The Bad Batch, dir. Ana Lily Amirpou (USA) Queer Lion: Hjartasteinn (Heartstone), Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson (Iceland/Denmark) FIPRESCI Prize: Une vie (A Woman’s Life), dir. Stéphane Brizé (France/ Belgium) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Koca Dünya (Big Big World), dir. Reha Erdem (Turkey) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Fien Troch, Home (Belgium) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Liberami (Libera Nos), dir. Federica Di Giacomo (Italy) Venice Horizons Award Best Short Film: A voce perduta (The Lost Voice), dir. Marcelo Martinessi (Argentina) Venice Days Best Film: The War Show, dir. Andreas Dalsgaard, Obaidah Zytoon (Denmark/Germany/Finland) Venezia Classici Award Best Documentary on Cinema: Le concours (The Competition), dir. Claire Simon (France) Venezia Classici Award Best Restored Film: L’uomo dei cinque palloni (The Man with the Balloons), dir. Marco Ferreri (Italy) International Film Critics’ Week Best Film: The Road to Mandalay, Midi Z (Myanmar/Taiwan)

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Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Singing in Graveyards, dir. Bradley Liew, Bianca Balbuena (Malaysia/Philippines) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Indivisibili (Indivisible), dir. Edoardo De Angelis (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actor: Michele Riondino, La ragazza del mondo (Worldly Girl), dir. Marco Danieli (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Actress: Sara Serraiocco, La ragazza del mondo (Worldly Girl) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Emma Stone, La La Land, dir. Damien Chazelle (USA) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Oscar Martinez, El ciudadano ilustre (The Distinguished Citizen), dir. Gastón Duprat, Mariano Cohn (Argentina/ Spain) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Paula Beer, Frantz, dir. François Ozon (France/Germany) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jerzy Skolimowski 2017 Leone d’oro: The Shape of Water, dir. Guillermo del Toro (USA) Leone d’argento: Jusqu’à la garde (Custody), dir. Xavier Legrand (France) Grand Jury Prize: Foxtrot, dir. Samuel Maoz (Israel/Switzerland/Gemany/France) Special Jury Prize: Sweet Country, dir. Warwick Thornton (Australia) Queer Lion: Marvin ou la belle éducation (Reinventing Marvin), dir. Anne Fontaine (France) FIPRESCI Prize: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, dir. Frederick Wiseman (USA) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Vahid Jalilvand, No Date, No Signature (Iran) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Nico, 1988, dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli (Italy) Venice Horizons Special Jury Prize: Caniba, dir. Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor (France) Venezia Classici Award Best Documentary on Cinema: Ksiaze i dybuk (The Prince and the Dybbuk), dir. Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosolowski (Poland/Germany) Venezia Classici Award Best Restored Film: Idi i smotri (Come and See), dir. Elem Klimov

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Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film: Astrometal, dir. Efthimis Kosemund Sanidis (Greece); Mon amour mon ami, dir. Adriano Valerio (Italy/France) Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Temporada de Caza (Hunting Season), dir. Natalia Garagiola (Argentina/France) Best VR Story: Bloodless, dir. Gina Kim Pasinetti Award Best Cast: Carlo Bucirosso, Antonio Buonomo, Claudia Gerini, Giampaolo Morelli, Raiz, Franco Ricciardi, Serena Rossi, Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets), dir. Manetti Bros. (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Charlotte Rampling, Hannah, dir. Andrea Pallaoro (Italy/France/Belgium) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Kamel El Basha, L’insulte (The Insult), dir. Ziad Doueiri (France/Lebanon/USA) Marcello Mastroianni Award: Charlie Plummer, Lean on Pete, dir. Andrew Haigh (UK) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Jane Fonda, Robert Redford 2018 Leone d’oro: Roma, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (Mexico) Leone d’argento Best Director: Jacques Audiard, Les frères Sisters (The Sisters Brothers) Grand Special Jury Prize: The Favourite, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos (UK/ Ireland/USA) (France, Spain, Belgium, Romania, USA) Special Jury Prize: The Nightingale, dir. Jennifer Kent (Australia) Queer Lion: José, dir. Li Cheng (Guatemala/USA) FIPRESCI Prize: Napszállta (Sunset), dir. László Nemes (Hungary/ France) FEDIC Award Special Mention: Ricordi?, dir. Valerio Mieli (Italy/ France) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Anons (The Announcement), dir. Mahmut Fazil Coskun (Turkey/Bulgaria) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Kraben rahu (Manta Ray), dir. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (Thailand/France/China) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Álvaro Brechner, La noche de 12 años (A Twelve-Year Night) (Uruguay/Spain/Argentina) Venice Horizons Award Best Short Film: Kado (A Gift), dir. Aditya Ahmad (Indonesia) Venezia Classici Award Best Documentary on Cinema: The Great Buster, dir. Peter Bogdanovich (USA) Critics’ Week Award: Still Recording, Saeed Al Batal, Ghiath Ayoub (Lebanon/Syria/France)

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Audience Award (Critics’ Week): Still Recording Best VR Story: Borderline, dir. Assaf Machnes Pasinetti Special Award: Alessandro Borghi, Jasmine Trinca, Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi), dir. Alessio Cremonini (Italy) Pasinetti Award Best Film: Capri-Revolution, dir. Mario Martone (Italy) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Olivia Colman, The Favourite Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate, dir. Julian Schnabel (USA/France) Marcello Mastronianni Award: Baykali Ganambarr, The Nightingale Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: David Cronenberg, Vanessa Redgrave 2019 Leone d’oro: Joker, dir. Todd Phillips (USA/Canada) Leone d’argento: Om det oändliga (About Endlessness), dir. Roy Andersson (Sweden/Germany/Norway) Grand Jury Prize: J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy), dir. Roman Polanski (France/Italy) Special Jury Prize: La mafia non è più quella di una volta (The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be), dir. Franco Maresco (Italy) Queer Lion: El Príncipe (The Prince), dir. Sebastián Muñoz (Chile/Argentina/Belgium) FIPRESCI Prize: J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy) Venice Horizons Award Special Jury Prize: Verdict, dir. Raymund Ribay Gutierrez (Philippines/France) Venice Horizons Award Best Film: Atlantis, dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych (Ukraine) Venice Horizons Award Best Director: Théo Court, White on White (Spain/Chile/France) Venice Horizons Award Best Short Film: Darling, dir. Saim Sadiq (Pakistan/USA) Venice Horizons Award Best Actor: Sami Bouajila, Bik Eneich: Un Fils (A Son), dir. Mehdi Barsaoui (Tunisia/France/Lebanon) Venice Horizons Award Best Actress: Marta Nieto, Madre, dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Spain/France) Venice Days Award: Piero Vivarelli, Life as a B-Movie, dir. Niccolò Vivarelli (Italy/Cuba/France) Venezia Classici Award Best Documentary on Cinema: Babenco: Alguém Tem que Ouvir o Coração e Dizer Parou (Babenco: Tell Me When I Die), dir. Bárbara Paz (Brazil)

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Venezia Classici Award Best Restored Film: Ekstase (Ecstasy), dir. Gustav Machatý) Critics’ Week Award: All This Victory, dir. Ahmad Ghossein (Lebanon/ France) Audience Award (International Film Critics’ Week): All This Victory Best Immersive VR work: The Key, dir. Céline Tricart (USA) Best Interactive VR work: A linha (The Line), dir. Ricardo Laganaro (Brazil) Best Linear VR work: Daughters of Chibok, dir. Joel Kachi Benson (Nigeria) Coppa Volpi, Best Actress: Ariane Ascaride, Gloria Mundi, dir. Robert Guédiguian (France) Coppa Volpi, Best Actor: Luca Marinelli, Martin Eden, dir. Pietro Marcello (Italy/France/Germany) Marcello Mastronianni Award: Toby Wallace, Babyteeth, dir. Shannon Murphy (Australia) Leone d’oro for Lifetime Achievement: Julie Andrews, Pedro Almodóvar

DAVID DI DONATELLO 1956 Best Director: Gianni Franciolini, Racconti romani (Roman Tales) Best Producer: Angelo Rizzoli, Le grandi manovre (The Grand Maneuver), dir. René Clair; Goffredo Lombardo, Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento), dir. Dino Risi; Niccolo Theodoli, Racconti romani (Roman Tales) Best Actress: Gina Lollobrigida, La donna più bella del mondo (Beautiful but Dangerous), dir. Robert Z. Leonard Best Actor: Vittorio De Sica, Pane, amore e . . . (Scandal in Sorrento) Best Foreign Film: Walt Disney, The Lady and the Tramp 1957 Best Director: Federico Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) Best Production: Dino De Laurentiis, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria); Renato Gualino, L’impero del sole (Empire in the Sun), dir. Enrico Gras Best Actress: Ingrid Bergman, Anastasia, dir. Anatole Litvak Best Actor: not awarded Silver David: Antonio Petrucci Golden Plate: Alberto Lattuada, Alberto Lancilotto

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Silver Plate: Vittorio De Seta 1958 Best Production: Leonardo Bonzi, La muraglia cinese (Behind the Great Wall), dir. Carlo Lizzani; Milko Skofic, Anna di Brooklyn (Fast and Sexy), dir. Carlo Lastricati Best Actress: Anna Magnani, Wild Is the Wind, dir. George Cukor Best Actor: not awarded Golden Plaque: Vittorio De Sica, Goffredo Lombardo, Antonio Pietrangeli, Marilyn Monroe, Spyros Skouras 1959 Best Director: Alberto Lattuada, La tempesta (Tempest) Best Production; Dino De Laurentiis, La tempesta (Tempest); Titanus, Maja desnuda (Naked Maja), dir. Henry Koster Best Actress: Anna Magnani, Nella città l’inferno (. . . and the Wild Wild Women), dir. Renato Castellani Best Actor: not awarded Golden Plaque: Susan Heyward, Renato Rascel 1960 Best Director: Federico Fellini, La dolce vita Best Production: Zebra Film, Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere), dir. Roberto Rossellini; Dino De Laurentiis, La grande guerra (The Great War), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actress: not awarded Best Actor: Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, La grande guerra (The Great War) Golden Plaque: Giuseppe Amato, Angelo Rizzoli, Titanus, Elizabeth Taylor, Grigorij Chukhraj 1961 Best Director: Michelangelo Antonioni, La notte (The Night) Best Production: Goffredo Lombardo, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers), dir. Luchino Visconti; Dino De Laurentiis, Tutti a casa (Everybody Home!), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actress: Sophia Loren, La ciociara (Two Women), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actor: Alberto Sordi, Tutti a casa (Everybody Home!)

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Special David: Claudia Cardinale, Franco Rossi, Gary Cooper 1962 Best Director: Ermanno Olmi, Il posto (The Job) Best Production: Angelo Rizzoli, Mondo cane, dir. Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi; Dino De Laurentiis, Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life), dir. Dino Risi Best Actress: not awarded Best Actor: Raf Vallone, A View from the Bridge, dir. Sidney Lumet Special David: Marlene Dietrich, Lea Massari 1963 Best Director: Vittorio De Sica, I sequestrati di Altona (The Condemned of Altona) Best Production: Goffredo Lombardo, Il gattopardo (The Leopard), dir. Luchino Visconti; Ultre Film, Triannon, Gaumont, Le glaive et la balance (Two Are Guilty), dir. André Cayatte Best Actress: Gina Lollobrigida, Venere imperiale (Imperial Venus), dir. Jean Delannoy; Silvana Mangano, Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), dir. Dino Risi Golden Plate: Alessandro Blasetti, Monica Vitti 1964 Best Director: Pietro Germi, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) Best Production: Franco Cristaldi, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned); Carlo Ponti, Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actress: Sophia Loren, Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) Best Actor: Marcello Mastroianni, Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) Golden Plate: Catherine Spaak, Mario Cecchi Gori, Universal International 1965 Best Director: Francesco Rosi, Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth); Vittorio De Sica, Matrimonio all’italiana

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Best Production: Carlo Ponti, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style) Best Actress: Sophia Loren, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style) Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, La congiuntura (Hard Time for Princes), dir. Ettore Scola; Marcello Mastroianni, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style) Golden Plate: Anthony Quinn, Melina Mercouri, Michael Cocoyannis, Dino De Laurentiis 1966 Best Director: Alessandro Blasetti, Io, io, io . . . e gli altri (Me, Me, Me . . . and the Others); Pietro Germi, Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees, and the Italians) Best Production: Dino De Laurentiis, The Bible . . . in the Beginning, dir. John Huston; Rizzoli Film, Africa addio (Farewell Africa), dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi; Pietro Germi and Robert Haggiag, Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians) Best Actress: Giulietta Masina, Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), dir. Federico Fellini Best Actor: Alberto Sordi, Fumo di Londra (Smoke over London), dir. Alberto Sordi Golden Plate: Mario Chiari, Vincenzo Labella, Giuseppe Rotunno, Rosanna Schiaffino, Lana Turner 1967 Best Director: Luigi Comencini, Incompreso (Misunderstood) Best Production: Mario Cecchi Gori, Il tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat), dir. Dino Risi; FAI Films, La bisbetica domata (The Taming of the Shrew), dir. Franco Zeffirelli Best Actress: Silvana Mangano, Le streghe (The Witches), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio De Sica, Franco Rossi, Mauro Bolognini, and Luchino Visconti Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, Il tigre (The Tiger and the Pussycat); Ugo Tognazzi, L’immorale (The Climax), dir. Pietro Germi Special David: Stefano Colagrande, Simone Giannozzi Golden Plate: Ingmar Bergman, Robert Dorfman, Elmar Klos, Graziella Granata, Ján Kádar

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1968 Best Director: Carlo Lizzani, Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four) Best Production: Dino De Laurentiis, Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four); Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), dir. Damiano Damiani Best Actress: Claudia Cardinale, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) Best Actor: Franco Nero, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) Golden Plaque: Lisa Gastoni, Damiano Damiani, Nino Manfredi 1969 Best Director: Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet) Best Production: Gianni Hecht Lucari, La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol), dir. Mario Monicelli; Bino Cicogna, C’era una volta il west (Once upon a Time in the West), dir. Sergio Leone Best Actress: Gina Lollobrigida, Buona sera, Signora Campbell (Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell), dir. Melvin Frank; Monica Vitti, La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol) Best Actor: Nino Manfredi, Vedo nudo (I See Naked), dir. Dino Risi; Alberto Sordi, Il medico della mutua (Be Sick . . . It's Free), dir. Luigi Zampa Golden Plaque: Florinda Balkan, Olivia Hussey, Leonard Whiting 1970 Best Film: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion), dir. Elio Petri; Metello, dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Director: Gillo Pontecorvo, Queimada (Burn!) Best Actress: Sophia Loren, I girasoli (Sunflower), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actor: Gian Maria Volonté, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto; Nino Manfredi, Nell’anno del signore (The Conspirators), dir. Luigi Magni Special David: Goldie Hawn, Ottavia Piccolo, Massimo Ranieri, Bruno Vailati, Marlène Jobert 1971 Best Film: Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), dir. Vittorio De Sica; Il conformista (The Conformist), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci; Waterloo, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk

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Best Director: Luchino Visconti, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) Best Actress: Florinda Balkan, Anonimo veneziano (The Anonymous Venetian), dir. Enrico Maria Salerno; Monica Vitti, Ninì Tirabusciò: La donna che inventò la mossa (Ninì Tirabusciò), dir. Marcello Fondato Best Actor: Ugo Tognazzi, La califfa (Lady Caliph), dir. Alberto Bevilacqua Special David: Lino Capolicchio, Mario Cecchi Gori, Mimsy Farmer, Nino Manfredi, Enrico Maria Salerno, RAI TV / Leone Cinematografica 1972 Best Film: La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool), dir. Elio Petri; Questa specie d’amore (This Kind of Love), dir. Alberto Bevilacqua Best Director: Sergio Leone, Giù la testa (Duck, You Sucker); Franco Zeffirelli, Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna (Brother Sun, Sister Moon) Best Actress: Claudia Cardinale, Bello onesto emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia), dir. Luigi Zampa Best Actor: Giancarlo Giannini, Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimì), dir. Lina Wertmüller; Alberto Sordi, Detenuto in attesa di giudizio (Why?), dir. Nanni Loy Special David: Glenda Jackson, Alain Delon, Mariangela Melato, Folco Quilici, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Louis Trintignant 1973 Best Film: Ludwig, dir. Luchino Visconti; Alfredo, Alfredo, dir. Pietro Germi; Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather Best Director: Luchino Visconti, Ludwig Best Actress: Florinda Bolkan, Cari genitori (Dear Parents), dir. Enrico Maria Salerno; Silvana Mangano, Lo scopone scientifico (The Scopone Game), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor: Alberto Sordi, Lo scopone scientifico (The Scopone Game) European David: Vittorio De Sica, Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation) Special David: Maria Schneider, Al Pacino, Helmut Berger Career David: Henry Fonda 1974 Best Film: Amarcord, dir. Federico Fellini; Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), dir. Franco Brusati Best Director: Federico Fellini, Amarcord

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Best Actress: Sophia Loren, Il viaggio (The Journey), dir. Vittorio De Sica; Monica Vitti, Polvere di stelle (Stardust), dir. Alberto Sordi Best Actor: Nino Manfredi, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate) European David: Franco Brusati, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate) Special David: Harriet Andersson, Adriana Asti, Silvio Clementelli, Françoise Fabian, Turi Ferro, Burt Lancaster, Goffredo Lombardo, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullman, Lino Ventura Career David: Burt Lancaster, Turi Ferro 1975 Best Film: Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece), dir. Luchino Visconti; Fatti di gente per bene (The Murri Affair), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Director: Dino Risi, Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman) Best Actress: Mariangela Melato, La poliziotta (Policewoman), dir. Steno Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman) European David: Melvin Frank, The Prisoner of Second Avenue Special David: Isabelle Adjani; Edmondo Amati; Pio Angeletti, Adriano De Micheli; Renato Pozzetto Career David: Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones 1976 Best Film: Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses), dir. Francesco Rosi Best Director: Francesco Rosi, Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses); Mario Monicelli, Amici miei (My Friends) Best Actress: Monica Vitti, L’anatra all’arancia (Duck in Orange Sauce) Best Actor: Adriano Celentano, Bluff, dir. Sergio Corbucci; Ugo Tognazzi, Amici miei (My Friends); Ugo Tognazzi, L’anatra all’arancia (Duck in Orange Sauce), dir. Luciano Salce European David: Jan Troell, Zandy’s Bride Special David: Agostina Belli, Martin Bregman, Christian De Sica, Martin Elfand, Fulvio Frizzi, Ennio Lorenzini, Ornella Muti, Michele Placido, Sidney Pollack Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Michelangelo Antonioni 1977 Best Film: Il deserto dei tartari (The Desert of the Tartars), dir. Valerio Zurlini; Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man), dir. Mario Monicelli

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Best Director: Valerio Zurlini, Il deserto dei tartari (The Desert of the Tartars); Mario Monicelli, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man) Best Actress: Mariangela Melato, Caro Michele (Dear Michael), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actor: Alberto Sordi, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man) European David: Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Robert Bresson Special David: Sean Connery, Vincenzo Crocitti, Diana Ferrara, Giorgio Ferrara, Jodie Foster, Angelica Ippolito, Alberto Lattuada, Enrico Montesano, MOSFILM (USSR), Martin Scorsese, Bolshoi Theatre, Shelley Winters, Giuliano Gemma Premio David: Giuliano Gemma, Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) 1978 Best Film: In nome del Papa Re (In the Name of the Pope King), dir. Luigi Magni; Il prefetto di ferro (The Iron Prefect), dir. Pasquale Squitieri Best Director: Ettore Scola, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day) Best Producer: Franco Committeri, In nome del Papa Re (In the Name of the Pope King) Best Actress: Mariangela Melato, Il gatto (The Cat), dir. Luigi Comencini; Sophia Loren, Una giornata particolare Best Actor: Nino Manfredi, In nome del Papa Re (In the Name of the Pope King) European David: Fred Zinneman, Julia Special David: Bruno Bozzetto, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Neil Simon, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Nikita Mikhalkov Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Andrzej Wajda 1979 Best Film: L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), dir. Ermanno Olmi; Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), dir. Francesco Rosi; Dimenticare Venezia (To Forget Venice), dir. Franco Brusati Best Director: Francesco Rosi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) Best Actress: Monica Vitti, Amori miei (My Loves), dir. Steno Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, Caro Papà (Dear Father), dir. Dino Risi

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European David: Franco Zeffirelli Special David: Daniele Costantini, Romy Schneider, Claudia Weill Career David: Amedeo Nazzari David “Luchino Visconti”: Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1980 Best Director: Gillo Pontecorvo, Ogro (Operation Ogre); Marco Bellocchio, Salto nel vuoto (A Leap in the Dark) Best Producer: Joseph Losey, Don Giovanni; Mario Cecchi Gori, Mani di velluto (Velvet Hands) Best Actress: Virna Lisi, La cicala (The Cricket), dir. Alberto Lattuada Best Actor: Adriano Celentano, Mani di velluto (Velvet Hands) European David: John Schlesinger, Yanks Special David: Justin Henry, Enrico Montesano, Hanna Schygulla, Carlo Verdone David “Luchino Visconti”: Andrei Tarkovsky 1981 Best Film: Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three), dir. Massimo Troisi, Mauro Berardi Best Director: Francesco Rosi, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Producer: Franco Committeri, Passione d’amore (Passion of Love), dir. Ettore Scola Best Actress: Valeria D’Obici, Passione d’amore (Passion of Love); Mariangela Melato, Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actor: Massimo Troisi, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three) Best Screenplay: Tonino Guerra and Francesco Rosi, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Musical Score: Fiorenzo Carpi, Voltati Eugenio (Eugenio), dir. Luigi Comencini European David: Krzysztof Zanussi Special David: Angi Vera Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: François Truffaut 1982 Best Film: Borotalco (Talcum Powder), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Director: Marco Ferreri, Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness) Best Emerging Director: Luciano Manuzzi, Fuori stagione (Off Season)

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Best Producer: Antonio Avati and Gianni Mivervini, Fuori stagione (Off Season) Best Actress: Eleonora Giorgi, Borotalco (Talcum Powder) Best Supporting Actress: Alida Valli, La caduta degli angeli ribelli (The Fall of the Rebel Angels), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Actor: Carlo Verdone, Borotalco (Talcum Powder) Best Supporting Actor: Angelo Infanti, Borotalco (Talcum Powder) Best Screenplay: Sergio Amidei and Marco Ferreri, Storie di ordinaria follia Tales of Ordinary Madness) Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness) Best Musical Score: Lucia Dalla and Fabio Liberatori, Borotalco (Talcum Powder) European David: Ermanno Olmi Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Cesare Zavattini Premio David “René Clair”: Markus Imhoof for Das Boot ist Voll (The Boat Is Full); Jaakko Pakkasvirta for Pedon Merkki (Sign of the Beast) 1983 Best Film: La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Best Director: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) Best Emerging Director: Francesco Laudadio, Grog Best Producer: Giuliani G. De Negri, La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) Best Actress: Giuliana De Sio, Io, Chiara, e lo scuro (The Pool Hustlers), dir. Maurizio Ponzi Best Supporting Actress: Virna Lisi, Sapore di mare (Time for Loving), dir. Carlo Vanzina; Lina Polito, Scusate il ritardo (Sorry for the Delay), dir. Massimo Troisi Best Actor: Francesco Nuti, Io, Chiara, e lo scuro (The Pool Hustlers) Best Supporting Actor: Lello Arena, Scusate il ritardo (Sorry for the Delay) Best Screenplay: Sergio Amidei and Ettore Scola, La nuit de Varennes (That Night in Varennes), dir. Ettore Scola Best Cinematography: Franco Di Giacomo, La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) Best Musical Score: Angelo Branduardi, State bene se potete (Stay Well If You Can), dir. Luigi Magni European David: Richard Attenborough, Gandhi Special David: Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla

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Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Orson Welles Premio David “René Clair”: Manuel Gutiérriez Aragòn Career David: Marcello Mastroianni 1984 Best Film: Ballando Ballando (Le bal), dir. Ettore Scola; E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On), dir. Federico Fellini Best Director: Ettore Scola, Ballando Ballando (Le bal) Best Emerging Director: Roberto Russo, Flirt Best Producer, Gianni Minervini, Mi manda Picone (Where’s Picone?), dir. Nanni Loy Best Actress: Lina Sastri, Mi manda Picone (Where’s Picone?) Best Supporting Actress: Elena Fabrizi, Acqua e sapone (Soap and Water), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor: Giancarlo Giannini, Mi manda Picone (Where’s Picone?) Best Supporting Actor: Carlo Giuffrè, Son contento (I’m Happy), dir. Maurizio Ponzi Best Screenplay: Tonino Guerra and Federico Fellini, E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) Best Musical Score: Wladimir Cosna and Armando Trovajoli, Ballando ballando (Le bal) Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Federico Fellini Premio David “René Clair”: Sergio Leone Special Plate: Vittorio Gassman, Sophia Loren, Nino Manfredi, Marioangela Melato, Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti 1985 Best Film: Carmen, dir. Francesco Rosi Best Director: Francesco Rosi, Carmen Best Emerging Director: Luciano De Crescenzo, Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spake Bellavista) Best Producer: Giuliani G. De Negri, Kaos (Chaos), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani; Fulvio Lucisano, Uno scandalo per bene (A Proper Scandal), dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile Best Actress: Lina Sastri, Segreti Segreti (Secrets Secrets), dir. Giuseppe Bertolucci Best Supporting Actress: Marina Confalone, Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spake Bellavista) Best Actor: Francesco Nuti, Casablanca, Casablanca, dir. Francesco Nuti

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Best Supporting Actor: Ricky Tognazzi, Qualcosa di biondo (Aurora), dir. Maurizio Ponzi Best Screenplay: Tonino Guerra, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Kaos (Chaos) Best Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Carmen Best Musical Score: Carlo Savina, Pizza Connection (The Sicilian Connection), dir. Damiano Damiani Special David: Italo Gemini, Sandro Pettini Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Istvan Szabo, Reuben Mamoulian Premio David “René Clair”: Wim Wenders 1986 Best Film: Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Director: Mario Monicelli, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Emerging Director: Enrico Montesano, A me mi piace (I Like It) Best Producer: Giovanni Di Clemente, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Actress: Angela Molina, Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime), dir. Lina Wertmüller Best Supporting Actress: Athina Cenci, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Actor: Marcello Mastroianni, Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), dir. Federico Fellini Best Supporting Actor: Bernard Blier, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Screenplay: Leo Benvenuti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Piero De Bernardi, Mario Monicelli, Tullio Pinelli, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Lanci, Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, Ginger e Fred Ginger and Fred; Riz Ortolani, Festa di laurea (Graduation Party), dir. Pupi Avati 30th Anniversary David: Francesco Cossiga, Giulietta Masina, Nicola Signorello Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Ingmar Bergman, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Giuseppe Rotunno Premio David “René Clair”: Federico Fellini

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1987 Best Film: La famiglia (The Family), dir. Ettore Scola Best Director: Ettore Scola, La famiglia (The Family) Best Emerging Director: Giorgio Treves, La coda del diavolo (The Malady of Love) Best Producer: Franco Cristaldi, Bernd Eichinger, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud Best Actress: Liv Ullmann, Mosca addio (Farewell Moscow), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Supporting Actress: Lina Sastri, L’inchiesta (The Inquiry), dir. Damiano Damiani Best Actor: Vittorio Gassman, La famiglia (The Family) Best Supporting Actor: Leo Gullotta, Il camorrista (The Professor), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Furio Scarpelli, Ettore Scola, La famiglia (The Family) Best Cinematography: Tonino delli Colli, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) Best Musical Score: Armando Trovajoli, La famiglia (The Family) Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Alain Resnais Premio David “René Clair”: Jean-Jacques Annaud Special David: Elena Valenzano 1988 Best Film: L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Best Director: Bernardo Bertolucci, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) Best Emerging Director: Daniele Luchetti, Domani accadrà (It’s Happening Tomorrow) Best Producer: John Daly, Franco Giovale, Joyce Herlihy, and Jeremy Thomas, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) Best Actress: Elena Safonova, Oci Ciornie (Dark Eyes), dir. Nikita Mikhalkov Best Supporting Actress: Elena Sofia Ricci, Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor: Marcello Mastroianni, Oci Ciornie (Dark Eyes) Best Supporting Actor: Peter O’Toole, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor)

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Best Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Mark Peploe, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor); Leo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Carlo Verdone, Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I) Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Gli occhiali d’oro (The GoldRimmed Glasses), dir. Giuliano Montaldo Best Song: Riz Ortolani, Ultimo minuto (Last Minute), dir. Pupi Avati Special David: Giulio Andreotti, for services to the Italian cinema Career David: Aldo Fabrizi, Francesco Rosi, Mario Cecchi Gor Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Stanley Kubrick 1989 Best Film: La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker), dir. Ermanno Olmi Best Director: Ermanno Olmi, La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) Best Emerging Director: Francesca Archibugi, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay) Best Producer: Filiberto Bandini, Caro Gorbaciov (Dear Gorbachev), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Actress: Stefania Sandrelli, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay) Best Supporting Actress: Athina Cenci, Compagni di scuola (School Friends), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor: Roberto Benigni, Il piccolo diavolo (The Little Devil), dir. Roberto Benigni Best Supporting Actor: Massimo Dapporto, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay); Carlo Croccolo, ‘Ore (The King of Naples), dir. Luigi Magni Best Screenplay: Francesca Archibugi, Gloria Malatesta, Claudia Sbarigia, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay) Best Cinematography: Dante Spinotti, La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Song: Lucio Dalla, Il frullo del passero (The Sparrow’s Fluttering), dir. Gianfranco Mingozzi Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

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1990 Best Film: Porte aperte (Open Doors), dir. Gianni Amelio Best Director: Mario Monicelli, Il male oscuro (Dark Illness) Best Emerging Director: Ricky Tognazzi, Piccoli equivoci (Little Misunderstandings) Best Producer: Gianni Minervini, Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, Turné (On Tour), dir. Gabriele Salvatores Best Actress: Elena Sofia Ricci, Ne parliamo lunedì (We’ll Talk about It on Monday), dir. Luciano Odorisio Best Supporting Actress: Nancy Brilli, Piccoli equivoci (Little Misunderstandings) Best Actor: Gian Maria Volonté, Porte aperte (Open Doors); Paolo Villaggio, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon), dir. Federico Fellini Best Supporting Actor: Sergio Castellito, Tre colonne in cronaca (Three Newspaper Columns), dir. Carlo Vanzina Best Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Storie di ragazzi e ragazze (The Story of Boys and Girls), dir. Pupi Avati Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, Mio caro Dr. Grasler (The Bachelor), dir. Roberto Faenza Best Musical Score: Claudio Mattone, Scugnizzi (Street Kids), dir. Nanni Loy Best Song: Claudio Mattone, Scugnizzi (Street Kids) Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Éric Rohmer Career David: Alberti Sordi 1991 Best Film: Mediterraneo, dir. Gabriele Salvatores; Verso Sera (Towards Evening), dir. Francesca Archibugi Best Director: Ricky Tognazzi, Ultrà; Marco Risi, Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside) Best Emerging Director: Sergio Rubini, La stazione (The Station); Alessandro D’Alatri, Americano rosso (Red American) Best Producer: Caludio Bonivento, Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside) Best Actress: Margherita Buy, La stazione (The Station) Best Supporting Actress: Zoe Incrocci, Verso sera (Towards Evening) Best Actor: Nanni Moretti, Il portaborse (The Yes Man), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Supporting Actor: Ciccio Ingrassia, Condominio (Condominium), dir. Felice Farina

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Best Screenplay: Daniele Luchetti, Sandro Petraglia, Stefani Rulli, Il portaborse (The Yes Man); Guido Manuli, Maurizio Nichetti, Volere volare (To Want to Fly), dir. Maurizio Nichetti Best Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli, Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (The Voyage of Captain Fracassa), dir. Ettore Scola Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Stanno Tutti Bene (Everybody’s Fine), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Marcel Carné Special David: Vittorio Gassman Career David: Alida Valli, Mario Cecchi Gori, Mario Nascimbene 1992 Best Film: Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children), dir. Gianni Amelio Best Director: Gianni Amelio, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) Best Emerging Director: Maurizio Zaccaro, Dove comincia la notte (Where Night Begins) Best Producer: Angelo Rizzoli, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) Best Actress: Giuliana De Sio, Cattiva (The Wicked), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Supporting Actress: Elisabetta Pozzi, Maledetto il giorno che t’ho incontrato (Damned the Day I Met You), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor: Carlo Verdone, Maledetto il giorno che t’ho incontrato (Damned the Day I Met You) Best Supporting Actor: Angelo Orlando, Pensavo fosse amore invece era un calesse (I Thought It Was Love), dir. Massimo Troisi Best Screenplay: Francesco Marciano, Carlo Verdone, Maledetto il giorno che t’ho incontrato (Damned the Day I Met You), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Cinematography: Danilo Desideri, Maledetto il giorno che t’ho incontrato (Damned the Day I Met You) Best Musical Score: Franco Piersanti, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) David “Luchino Visconti”: Ermanno Olmi Special David: Giuseppe Ieracitano, Valentina Scalici, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children); Roberto Benigni 1993 Best Film: Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin), dir. Francesca Archibugi Best Director: Roberto Faenza, Jona che visse nella balena (Look to the Sky); Ricky Tognazzi, La scorta (The Escort)

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577

Best Emerging Director: Mario Martone, Morte di un matematico napoletano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician) Best Producer: Claudio Bonivento, La scorta (The Escort) Best Actress: Antonella Ponziani, Verso sud (Towards the South), dir. Pasquale Pozzessere Best Supporting Actress: Marina Confalone, Arriva la bufera (The Storm Is Coming), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Actor: Sergio Castellitto, Il grande cocomero Best Supporting Actor: Claudio Amendola, Un’altra vita (Another Life), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati Best Screenplay: Francesca Archibugi, Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin) Best Cinematography: Alessio Gensini, La scorta (The Escort) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Jona che visse nella balena (Look to the Sky) Special David: Carlo Cecchi Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Edgar Reitz David “Franco Cristaldi”: Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia 1994 Best Film: Caro diario (Dear Diary), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Director: Carlo Verdone, Perdiamoci di vista (Let’s Not Keep in Touch) Best Emerging Director: Simona Izzo, Maniaci sentimentali (Sentimental Maniacs); Francesco Ranieri Martinotti, Abissinia (Abyssinia); Leone Pompucci, Mille bolle blu (A Thousand Blue Bubbles) Best Producer: Aurelio De Laurentiis, Per amore solo per amore (For Love, Only for Love), dir. Giovanni Veronesi Best Actress: Asia Argento, Perdiamoci di vista (Let’s Not Keep in Touch) Best Supporting Actress: Monica Scattini, Maniaci sentimentali Best Actor: Giulio Scarpati, Il giudice ragazzino (The Boy Judge), dir. Alessandro Di Robilant Best Supporting Actor: Alessandro Haber, Per amore, solo per amore (For Love, Only for Love) Best Screenplay: Ugo Chiti, Giovanni Veronesi, Per amore, solo per amore (For Love, Only for Love), dir. Giovanni Veronesi Best Cinematography: Dante Spinotti, Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Woods), dir. Ermanno Olmi; Bruno Cascio, Padre e figlio (Father and Son), dir. Pasquale Pozzessere Best Musical Score: Nicole Piovani, Caro diario (Dear Diary) Career David: Alberto Sordi

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Special David: Stefano Dionisi Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Manoel de Oliveira David “Franco Cristaldi”: Alberto Lattuada 1995 Best Film: La scuola (School), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Director: Mario Martone, L’amore molesto (Nasty Love) Best Emerging Director: Paolo Virzì, La bella vita (Living It Up) Best Producer: Pietro Valsecchi, Un eroe borghese (Ordinary Hero), dir. Michele Placido Best Actress: Anna Bonaiuto, L’amore molesto (Nasty Love) Best Supporting Actress: Angela Luce, L’amore molesto (Nasty Love) Best Actor: Marcello Mastroianni, Sostiene Pereira (According to Pereira), dir. Roberto Faenza Best Supporting Actor: Giancarlo Giannini, Come due coccodrilli (Like Two Crocodiles), dir. Giacomo Campiotti Best Screenplay: Luigi Magni, Carla Listarini, Nemici d’infanzia (Childhood Enemies), dir. Luigi Magni; Alessandro D’Alatri, Senza pelle (Without Skin), dir. Alessandro D’Alatri Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Lamerica, dir. Gianni Amelio Best Musical Score: Franco Piersanti, Lamerica Special David: Vittorio Cecchi Gori, Aurelio De Laurentiis, Milcho Manchevski, Michele Placido Premio David “Luchino Visconti”: Pupi Avati 1996 Best Film: Ferie d’agosto (Summer Holidays), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Emerging Director: Stefano Incerti, Il verificatore (The Gas Inspector) Best Producer: Roberto Di Girolamo, Pietro Innocenzi, Palermo Milano solo andata (Palermo–Milan One Way), dir. Claudio Fragasso Best Actress: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, La seconda volta (The Second Time), dir. Mimmo Calopresti Best Supporting Actress: Marina Confalone, La seconda volta (The Second Time) Best Actor: Giancarlo Giannini, Celluloide (Celluloid), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Supporting Actor: Leopoldo Trieste, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Screenplay: Carlo Lizzani, Ugo Pirro, Furio Scarpelli, Celluloide

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579

Best Cinematography: Alfio Contini, Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders Best Musical Score: Manuel De Sica, Celluloide (Celluloid) Career David: Vittorio Gassman, Gina Lollobrigida 40th Anniversary David: Rita Rusie, Aurelio De Laurentiis, Giovanni Di Clemente, Virna Lisi 1997 Best Film: La tregua (The Truce), dir. Francesco Rosi Best Director: Francesco Rosi, La tregua (The Truce) Best Emerging Director: Fulvio Ottaviano, Cresceranno i carciofi a Mimongo (Artichokes Will Grow at Mimongo) Best Producer: Leo Pescarolo and Guido De Laurentiis, La tregua (The Truce) Best Actress: Asia Argento, Compagna di viaggio (Traveling Companion), dir. Peter Del Monte Best Supporting Actress: Barbara Enrichi, Il ciclone (The Cyclone), dir. Leonardo Pieraccioni Best Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Testimone a rischio (An Eyewitness Account), dir. Pasquale Pozzessere Best Supporting Actor: Leo Gullotta, Il carniere (The Game Bag), dir. Maurizio Zaccaro Best Screenplay: Fabio Carpi, Nel profondo paese straniero (Homer: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man), dir. Fabio Carpi Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Marianna Ucrìa, dir. Roberto Faenza Best Musical Score: Paolo Conte, La freccia azzurra (How the Toys Saved Christmas), dir. Enzo D’Alò Best Short Film: Senza parole (Wordless), dir. Antonello Di Leo Career David: Claudia Cardinale School David: Leonardo Pieracioni, Il ciclone (The Cyclone) Special David: Marcello Mastroianni 1998 Best Film: La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), dir. Roberto Benigni Best Director: Roberto Benigni, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Emerging Director: Roberta Torre, Tano da morire (To Die for Tano) Best Producer: Elda Ferri and Gianluigi Braschi, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful)

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Best Actress: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, La parola amore esiste (Notes of Love), dir. Mimmo Calopresti Best Supporting Actress: Nicoletta Braschi, Ovosodo (Hardboiled Egg), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Actor: Roberto Benigni, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Supporting Actor: Silvio Orlando, Aprile (April), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Screenplay: Roberto Benigni and Vincenzo Cerami, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Musical Score: Nino D’Angelo, Tano da morire To Die for Tano) Best Short Film: La matta dei fiori (Flower Mad), dir. Rolando Stefanelli Career David: Tullio Pinelli School David: Roberto Benigni, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) 1999 Best Film: Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World), dir. Giuseppe Piccioni Best Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Emerging Director: Luciano Ligabue, Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow) Best Producer: Lionello Cerri, Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World) Best Actress: Margherita Buy, Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World) Best Supporting Actress: Cecilia Dazzi, Matrimoni (Marriages), dir. Cristina Comencini Best Actor: Stefano Accorsi, Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow) Best Supporting Actor: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Dal perduto amore (Of Lost Love), dir. Michele Placido Best Screenplay: Giuseppe Piccioni, Gualtiero Rosella, Lucia Zei, Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World) Best Cinematography: Lajos Koltai, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Short Film: Quasi Fratelli (Almost Brothers), dir. Francesco Falaschi Career David: Mauro Bolognini, Sophia Loren, Alberto Sordi School David: Giuseppe Tornatore, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) 2000 Best Film: Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips), dir. Silvio Soldini

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581

Best Director: Silvio Soldini, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Emerging Director: Alessandro Piva, La Capagira (My Head Is Spinning) Best Producer: Amedeo Pagani, Garage Olimpo, dir. Marco Bechis Best Actress: Licia Maglietta, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Supporting Actress: Marina Massironi, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Actor: Bruno Ganz, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Supporting Actor: Giuseppe Battiston, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Screenplay: Doriana Leondeff, Silvio Soldini, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips); Fabio Cianchetti, Canone inverso (Canone inverso—Making Love), dir. Ricky Tognazzi Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Canone inverso (Canone inverso—Making Love) Best Short Film: Monna Lisa, dir. Matteo Del Bo School David: Ricky Tognazzi, Canone inverso (Canone inverso—Making Love) Special David: Christian De Sica, Massimo Boldi, Vittorio Cecchi Gori, Leonardo Pieraccioni Golden Plate: Mariangela Melato, Giancarlo Giannini, Giorgio Armani, Unione Nazionale Industrie Tecniche Cineausdiovisive 2001 Best Film: La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Director: Gabriele Muccino, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss) Best Emerging Director: Alex lnfascelli, Almost Blue Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss) Best Actress: Laura Morante, La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room) Best Supporting Actress: Stefania Sandrelli, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss) Best Actor: Luigi Lo Cascio, I cento passi (The Hundred Steps), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Supporting Actor: Tony Sperandeo, I cento passi (The Hundred Steps) Best Screenplay: Marco Tullio Giordana, Claudio Fava, Monica Zappelli, I cento passi (The Hundred Steps) Best Cinematography: Lajos Koltai, Malèna, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room)

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Best Short Film: Gavetta, dir. Craig Bell School David: Marco Tullio Giordana, I cento passi (The Hundred Steps) Special David: Tony Curtis, Martin Scorsese, Enzo Verzini 2002 Best Film: Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), dir. Ermanno Olmi Best Director: Ermanno Olmi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms) Best Emerging Director: Marco Ponti, Santa Maradona (Holy Maradona) Best Producer: Luigi Musini, Roberto Cicutto, and Ermanno Olmi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms) Best Actress: Marina Confalone, Incantesimo napoletano (A Neapolitan Spell), dir. Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero Best Supporting Actress: Stefania Sandrelli, Figli/Hijos (Sons and Daughters), dir. Marco Bechis Best Actor: Giancarlo Giannini, Ti voglio bene Eugenio (I Love You, Eugenio), dir. Francisco Jose Fernandez Best Supporting Actor: Libero De Rienzo, Santa Maradona (Holy Maradona) Best Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms) Best Cinematography: Fabio Olmi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms) Best Musical Score: Fabbio Vacchi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms) Best Short Film: Non dire gatto (Never Say Cat), dir.Giorgio Tirabassi School David: Renzo Martinelli, Vajont: La diga del disonore (Vajont: Dam of Shame) Special David: Liza Minelli, Carlo Rambaldi, Franco Zeffirelli 2003 Best Film: La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Director: Pupi Avati, Il cuore altrove (Incantato) Best Emerging Director: Daniele Vicari, Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, Respiro, dir. Emanuele Crialese Best Actress: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Best Supporting Actress: Piera Degli Esposti, L’ora di religione (My Mother’s Smile), dir. Marco Bellocchio

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583

Best Actor: Massimo Girotti, La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Best Supporting Actor: Ernesto Mahieux, L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer), dir. Matteo Garrone Best Screenplay: Matteo Garrone, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer), dir. Matteo Garrone Best Cinematography: Daniele Nannuzzi, El Alamein: La linea di fuoco (El Alamein: The Line of Fire), dir. Enzo Monteleone Best Musical Score: Andrea Guerra, La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Best Short Film: Racconto di Guerra (War Story), dir. Mario Amura; Rosso fango (Red Mud), dir. Paolo Ameli School David: Ferzan Ozpetek, La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Career David: Isabelle Huppert, Gregory Peck 2004 Best Film: La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Director: Marco Tullio Giordana, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Emerging Director: Salvatore Mereu, Ballo a tre passi (Three-Step Dancing) Best Producer: Angelo Barbagallo, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best European Film: Dogville, dir. Lars von Trier; Rosenstrasse, dir. Margarethe Von Trotta Best Foreign Film: The Barbarian Invasions, dir. Denys Arcand Best Actress: Penelope Cruz, Non ti muovere (Don’t Move), dir. Sergio Castellito Best Supporting Actress: Margherita Buy, Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Actor: Sergio Castellitto, Non ti muovere (Don’t Move) Best Supporting Actor: Roberto Herlitzka, Buongiorno notte (Good Morning, Night), dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Screenplay: Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Cinematography: Italo Petriccione, Io non ho paura (I Am Not Afraid), dir. Gabriele Salvatores Best Musical Score: Banda Osiris, Primo amore (First Love), dir. Matteo Garrone Best Feature Documentary: Guerra (War), Pippo Delbono Best Short Film: Sole (Sun), dir. Michele Carillo; Zinanà, dir. Pippo Mezzapesa

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Young David: Gabriele Salvatores, Io non ho paura (I Am Not Afraid) Special David: Goffredo Lombardo, Steven Spielberg Golden Plate: Peter Falk 2005 Best Film: Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love), dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Director: Paolo Sorrentino, Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) Best Emerging Director: Saverio Costanzo, Private Best Producer: Rosario Rinaldo, Certi bambini (A Children’s Story), dir. Andrea and Antonio Frazzi Best European Film: Mar adentro (The Sea Inside), dir. Alejandro Amenábar Best Foreign Film: Million Dollar Baby, dir. Clint Eastwood Best Actress: Barbara Bobulova, Cuore sacro (Sacred Heart), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Supporting Actress: Margherita Buy, Manuale d’amore (The Manual of Love), dir. Giovanni Veronesi Best Actor: Toni Servillo, Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) Best Supporting Actor: Carlo Verdone, Manuale d’amore (The Manual of Love) Best Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino, Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Le consequenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) Best Musical Score: Riz Ortolani, Ma quando arrivano le ragazze? (When Do the Girls Show Up?), dir. Pupi Avati Best Song: Tony Renis, Christmas in Love, dir. Neri Parenti Best Feature Documentary: Un silenzio particolare (A Particular Silence), dir. Stefano Rulli Best Short Film: Aria, dir. Claudio Noce; Lotta libera (Wrestling), dir. Stefano Via Young David: Roberto Faenza, Alla luce del sole (Come into the Light) Special David: Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, Carlo Azelio Ciampi, Cecchi Gori Group, Tom Cruise 2006 Best Film: Il caimano (The Caiman), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Director: Nanni Moretti, Il caimano (The Caiman)

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Best Emerging Director: Fausto Brizzi, Notte prima degli esami (Night before the Exams) Best Producer: Angelo Barbagallo and Nanni Moretti, Il caimano (The Caiman) Best European Film: Match Point, dir. Woody Allen Best Foreign Film: Crash, dir. Paul Haggis Best Actress: Valeria Golino, La guerra di Mario (Mario’s War), dir. Antonio Capuano Best Supporting Actress: Angela Finocchiaro, La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell), dir. Cristina Comencini Best Actor: Silvio Orlando, Il caimano (The Caiman) Best Supporting Actor: Pierfrancesco Favino, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel), dir. Michele Placido Best Screenplay: Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Michele Placido, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) Best Musical Score: Franco Piersanti, Il caimano (The Caiman) Best Song: Caterina Caselli, Arrivederci amore, ciao (The Goodbye Kiss), dir. Michele Soavi Best Feature Documentary: Il bravo gatto prende i topi (The Wise Cat Catches Mice), dir. Francesco Conversano Best Short Film: Un inguaribile amore (A Love That Will Not Heal), dir. Giovanni Covini Young David: Michele Placido, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) 50th Anniversary David Award: Gina Lollobrigida, Piero Tosi, Giuseppe Rotunno, Ennio Morricone, Dino De Laurentiis, Francesco Rosi, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Mario Garbuglia 2007 Best Film: La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) Best Emerging Director: Kim Rossi Stuart, Anche libero va bene (Along the Ridge) Best Producer: Donatella Botti, L’aria salata (Salty Air), dir. Alessandro Angelini Best European Film: The Lives of Others, dir. Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck Best Foreign Film: Babel, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu Best Actress: Ksenya Rappoport, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman)

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Best Supporting Actress: Ambra Angiolini, Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek; Angela Finocchiaro, Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Actor: Elio Germano, Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child) Best Supporting Actor: Giorgio Colangeli, L’aria salata (Salty Air) Best Screenplay: Daniele Luchetti, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli, Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child) Best Cinematography: Fabio Zamarion, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) Best Song: Daniele Silvestri, Notturno Bus (Night Bus), dir. Davide Marengo Best Feature Documentary: Il mio paese (My Country), dir. Daniele Vicari Best Short Film: Meridionali senza filtro (Unfiltered Southerners), dir. Michele Bia Young David: Cristiano Bortone, Rosso come il cielo (Red Like the Sky) Career David: Armando Trovajoli, Giuliano Montaldo, Carlo Lizzani 2008 Best Film: La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake), dir. Andrea Molaioli Best Director: Andrea Molaioli, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Emerging Director: Andrea Molaioli, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Producer: Francesca Cima, Nicola Giuliano, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best European Film: Irina Palm, dir. Sam Garbarski Best Foreign Film: No Country for Old Men, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen Best Actress: Margherita Buy, Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds), dir. Silvio Soldini Best Supporting Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds) Best Actor: Toni Servillo, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Supporting Actor: Alessandro Gassman, Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos), dir. Antonello Grimaldi Best Screenplay: Sandro Petraglia, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake)

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Best Cinematography: Ramiro Civita, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Musical Score: Paolo Buonvino, Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos) Best Song: Ivano Fossati, Caos calmo Best Feature Documentary: Madri (Mothers), dir. Barbara Cupisti Best Short Film: Uova (Eggs), dir. Alessandro Celli Young David: Silvio Muccino, Parlami d’amore (Talk to Me about Love) Special David: Luigi Magni 2009 Best Film: Gomorra (Gomorrah), dir. Matteo Garrone Best Director: Matteo Garrone, Gomorra (Gomorrah) Best Emerging Director: Gianni Di Gregori, Pranzo di Ferragosto (MidAugust Lunch) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, Gomorra (Gomorrah) Best European Film: Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle Best Foreign Film: Gran Torino, dir. Clint Eastwood Best Actress: Alba Rohrwacher, Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father), dir. Pupi Avati Best Supporting Actress: Piera degli Esposti, Il divo, dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Actor: Toni Servillo, Il divo Best Supporting Actor: Giuseppe Battiston, Non pensarci (Don’t Think about It), dir. Gianni Zanasi Best Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Di Gregorio, Gomorra (Gomorrah) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Il divo Best Musical Score: Teho Teardo, Il divo Best Feature Documentary: Rata nece biti! (There Will Be No War), dir. Daniele Gaglianone Best Short Film: L’arbitro (The Referee), dir. Paolo Zucca Young David: Giulio Manfredonia, Si può fare (We Can Do That) Career David: Virna Lisi, Paolo Villaggio Special David: Christian De Sica 2010 Best Film: L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come), dir. Giorgio Diritti Best Director: Marco Bellocchio, Vincere Best Emerging Director: Valerio Mieli, Dieci inverni (Ten Winters)

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Best Producer: Aranciafilm (Simone Bachini, Giorgio Diritti), L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come) Best European Film: Le concert (The Concert), dir. Radu Mihaileanu Best Foreign Film: Inglourious Basterds, dir. Quentin Tarantino Best Actress: Micaela Ramazzotti, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Supporting Actress: Ilaria Occhini, Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actor: Valerio Mastrandrea, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing) Best Supporting Actor: All the supporting male cast of Baarìa, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore; Ennio Fantastichini, Mine vaganti Best Screenplay: Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo, Paolo Virzì, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing) Best Cinematography: Daniele Ciprì, Vincere Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Baarìa, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Song: Jovanotti, Baciami ancora (Kiss Me Again), dir. Gabriele Muccino Best Feature Documentary: La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf), dir. Pietro Marcello Best Short Film: Passing Time, dir. Laura Bispuri Young David: Giuseppe Tornatore, Baarìa Career David: Bud Spencer, Terence Hill, Lina Wertmüller, Tonino Guerra 2011 Best Film: Noi credevamo (We Believed), dir. Mario Martone Best Director: Daniele Luchetti, La nostra vita (Our Life) Best Emerging Director: Rocco Papaleo, Basilicata Coast to Coast Best Producer: Claudio Bonivento, Tilde Corsi, Gianni Romoli, 20 sigarette (20 Cigarettes), dir. Aureliano Amadei Best European Film: The King’s Speech, dir. Tom Hooper Best Foreign Film: Hereafter, dir. Clint Eastwood Best Actress: Paola Cortellesi, Nessuno mi può giudicare (Escort in Love), dir. Massimiliano Bruno Best Supporting Actress: Valentina Lodovini, Benvenuti al sud (Welcome to the South), dir. Luca Miniero Best Actor: Elio Germano, La nostra vita (Our Life) Best Supporting Actor: Giuseppe Battiston, La passione (The Passion), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati Best Screenplay: Mario Martone, Giuliano De Cataldo, Noi credevamo (We Believed)

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Best Cinematography: Renato Berta, Noi credevamo (We Believed) Best Musical Score: Rita Marcotulli, Rocco Papaleo, Basilicata Coast to Coast Best Song: Max Gazzè, Basilicata Coast to Coast Best Feature Documentary: È stato morto un ragazzo (A Boy Has Been Dead), dir. Filippo Vendemmiati Best Short Film: Jody delle giostre (Jody and the Carousels), dir. Adriano Sforzi Young David: Aureliano Amadei, 20 sigarette (20 Cigarettes) Career David: Claudio Bonivento, Ettore Scola Special David for the 150 years of Italian unification: Giorgio Napolitano 2012 Best Film: Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Best Director: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) Best Emerging Director: Francesco Bruni, Scialla! Stai sereno (Easy!) Best Producer: Grazia Volpi, Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) Best European Film: Intouchables (The Intouchables), dir. Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano Best Foreign Film: A Separation, dir. Ashgar Farhadi Best Actress: Zhao Tao, Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet), dir. Andrea Segre Best Supporting Actress: Michela Cescon, Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Actor: Michel Piccoli, Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Supporting Actor: Pierfrancesco Favino, Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy) Best Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello, This Must Be the Place, dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, This Must Be the Place Best Musical Score: David Byrne, Will Oldham, This Must Be the Place Best Song: David Byrne, Will Oldham, This Must Be the Place Best Feature Documentary:Tahrir: Liberation Square, dir. Stefano Savona Best Short Film: Dell’ammazzare il maiale (Killing the Pig), dir. Simone Massi Young David: Francesco Bruni, Scialla! Stai sereno (Easy!) Career David: Liliana Cavani

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2013 Best Film: La migliore offerta (The Best Offer), dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, La migliore offerta (The Best Offer) Best Emerging Director: Leonardo di Costanzo, L’intervallo (The Interval) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, Diaz (Diaz—Don’t Clean up This Blood), dir. Daniele Vicari Best European Film: Amour, dir. Michael Haneke Best Foreign Film: Django Unchained, dir. Quentin Tarantino Best Actress: Margherita Buy, Viaggio sola (A Five Star Life), dir. Maria Sole Tognazzi Best Supporting Actress: Maya Sansa, Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty), dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Actor: Valerio Mastrandrea, Gli equilibristi (Balancing Act), dir. Ivano De Matteo Best Supporting Actor: Valerio Mastrandrea, Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom), dir. Roberto Andò Best Screenplay: Roberto Andò, Angelo Pasquini, Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom) Best Cinematography: Marco Onorato, Reality, dir. Matteo Garrone Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, La migliore offerta (The Best Offer) Best Feature Documentary: Anija, la nave, dir. Roland Sejko Best Short Film: L’esecuzione (The Execution), dir. Enrico Ianaccone Young David: Giuseppe Tornatore, La miglior offerta (The Best Offer) Career David: Vincenzo Cerami 2014 Best Film: Il capitale umano (Human Capital), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Director: Paolo Sorrentino, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) Best Emerging Director: Pierfrancesco Diliberto, La mafia uccide solo d’estate (The Mafia Kills Only in Summer) Best Producer: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) Best European Film: Philomena, dir. Stephen Frears Best Foreign Film: Grand Budapest Hotel, dir. Wes Anderson Best Actress: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Supporting Actress: Valeria Golino, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Actor: Toni Servillo, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)

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Best Supporting Actor: Fabrizio Gifuni, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best screenplay: Francesco Piccolo, Francesco Bruni, Paolo Virzì, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) Best Musical Score: Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Song’e Napule (Song of Naples), dir. Manetti Bros Best Feature Documentary: Stop the Pounding Heart, dir. Roberto Minervini Best Short Film: 37°4S, dir. Adriano Valerio Young David: Pierfrancesco Diliberto, La mafia uccide solo d’estate (The Mafia Kills Only in Summer) Career David: Marco Bellocchio Special David: Sophia Loren, Marco Bellocchio, Andrea Occhipinti (for Lucky Red), Riz Ortolani 2015 Best Film: Anime nere (Black Souls), dir. Francesco Munzi Best Director: Francesco Munzi, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Emerging Director: Edoardo Falcone, Se Dio vuole (God Willing) Best Producer: Luigi Musini, Olivia Musim, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best European Film: The Theory of Everything, dir. James Marsh Best Foreign Film: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), dir. Alejandro G. Iñàrritu Best Actress: Margherita Buy, Mia madre (My Mother), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Supporting Actress: Giulia Lazzarini, Mia madre (My Mother) Best Actor: Elio Germano, Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi), dir. Mario Martone Best Supporting Actor: Carlo Buccirosso, Noi e la Giulia (The Legendary Giulia and Other Miracles), dir. Edoardo Leo Best Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Fabrizio Ruggirello, Francesco Munzi, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Cinematography: Vladan Radovic, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Musical Score: Giuliano Taviani, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Song: Giuliano Taviani, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Feature Documentary: Belluscone: Una storia siciliana (Belluscone: A Sicilian Story), dir. Franco Maresco Best Short Film: Thriller, dir. Giuseppe Marco Albano Young David: Edoardo Leo, Noi e la Giulia

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2016 Best Film: Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers), dir. Paolo Genovese, prod. Marco Belardi Best Director: Matteo Garrone, Il racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales) Best Emerging Director: Gabriele Mainetti, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Producer: Gabriele Mainetti, RAI Cinema, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best European Film: Saul fia (Son of Saul), dir. Nemes László Best Foreign Film: Bridge of Spies, dir. Steven Spielberg Best Actress: Ilenia Pastorelli, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Supporting Actress: Antonia Truppo, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Actor: Claudio Santamaria, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Supporting Actor: Luca Marinelli, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Screenplay: Filippo Bologna, Paolo Costella, Paolo Genovese, Paola Mammini, Rolando Ravello, Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers) Best Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky, Il racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales) Best Musical Score: David Lang, Youth—la giovinezza (Youth), dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Song: David Lang, Youth—la giovinezza (Youth) Best Feature Documentary: S Is for Stanley, dir. Alex Infascelli Best Short Film: Bellissima, dir. Alessandro Capitani Young David: Giuseppe Tornatore, La corrispondenza (Correspondence) 60th Anniversary David: Gina Lollobrigida, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani 2017 Best Film: La pazza gioia (Like Crazy), dir. Paolo Virzì, prod. Marco Belardi Best Director: Paolo Virzì, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy) Best Emerging Director: Marco Danieli, La ragazza del mondo (Worldly Girl) Best Producer: Pierpaolo Verga, Indivisibili (Indivisible), dir. Edoardo De Angelis Best European Film: I, Daniel Blake, dir. Ken Loach Best Foreign Film: Nocturnal Animals, dir. Tom Ford Best Actress: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy)

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Best Supporting Actress: Antonia Truppo, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Actor: Stefano Accorsi, Veloce come il vento (Italian Race), dir. Matteo Rovere Best Supporting Actor: Valerio Mastrandrea, Fiore, dir. Claudio Giovannesi Best Screenplay: Edoardo De Angelis, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Cinematography: Michele D’Attanasio, Veloce come il vento (Italian Race) Best Musical Score: Enzo Avitabile, Nicola Guaglianone, Barbara Petronio, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Song: Enzo Avitabile, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Feature Documentary: Crazy for Football, dir. Volfango De Biasi Best Short Film: A casa mia (At My Home), dir. Claudio Piredda Young David: Pierfrancesco Diliberto (Pif), In guerra per amore (At War with Love) Career David: Roberto Benigni 2018 Best Film: Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets), dir. Manetti Bros Best Director: Jonas Carpignano, A Ciambra Best Emerging Director: Donato Carrisi, La ragazza nella nebbia (The Girl in the Fog) Best Producer: Luciano Stella, Maria Carolina Terzi, Gatta Cenerentola (Cinderella the Cat), dir. Ivan Cappiello, Marino Guarnieri, Alessandro Rak, Dario Sansone Best European Film: The Square, dir. Ruben Ostlund Best Foreign Film: Dunkirk, dir. Christopher Nolan Best Actress: Jasmine Trinca, Fortunata (Lucky), dir. Sergio Castellito Best Supporting Actress: Claudia Gerini, Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets) Best Actor: Renato Carpentieri, La tenerezza (Tenderness), dir. Gianni Amelio Best Supporting Actor: Giuliano Montaldo, Tutto quello che vuoi (Everything You Want), dir. Francesco Bruni Best Original Screenplay: Susanna Nichiarelli, Nico, 1988, dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli Best Adapted Screenplay: Antonio Piazza, Fabio Grassadonia, Sicilian Ghost Story, dir. Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia Best Cinematography: Gian Filippo Corticelli, Napoli velata (Naples in Veils), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Musical Score: Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets)

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Best Original Song: Giampaolo Morelli, Nelson, Franco Ricciardi, Serena Rossi, Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Ammore e malavita (Love and Bullets) Best Short Film: Bismillah, dir. Alessandro Grande Young David: Francesco Bruni, Tutto quello che vuoi (Everything You Want) Career David: Steven Spielberg Special David: Stefania Sandrelli, Diane Keaton 2019 Best Film: Dogman, dir. Matteo Garrone Best Director: Matteo Garrone, Dogman Best Emerging Director: Alessio Cremonini, Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi) Best Producer: Cinemaundici, Lucky Red, Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi) Best Actress: Elena Sofia Ricci, Loro, dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Supporting Actress: Marina Confalone, Il vizio della speranza (The Vice of Hope), dir. Edoardo De Angelis Best Actor: Alessandro Borghi, Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi) Best Supporting Actor: Edoardo Pesce, Dogman Best Original Screenplay: Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone, Dogman Best Adapted Screenplay: Walter Fasano, Luca Guadagnino, James Ivory, Chiamami col tuo nome (Call Me by Your Name), dir. Luca Guadagnino Best Cinematography: Nicolaj Brüel, Dogman Best Musical Score: Apparat, Phillipp Thimm, Capri-Revolution, dir. Mario Martone Best Original Song: Sufjan Stevens, Chiamami col tuo nome (Call Me by Your Name) Best Feature Documentary: Santiago, Italia, dir. Nanni Moretti Best Short Film: Frontiera, dir. Alessandro De Gregorio Best Foreign Film: Roma, dir. Alfonso Cuarón Young David: Alessio Cremonini, Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi) Career David: Tim Burton Special David: Dario Argento, Francesca Lo Schiavo, Uma Thurman Audience David: Gabriele Muccino, A casa tutti bene (There’s No Place Like Home)

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NASTRI D’ARGENTO 1945–1946 Best Film: Roma città aperta (Rome Open City), dir. Roberto Rossellini Best Director: Alessandro Blasetti, Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life); Vittorio De Sica, Sciuscià (Shoe-Shine) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Clara Calamai, L’adultera (The Adulteress), dir. Duilio Coletti Best Actor in a Leading Role: Andrea Checchi, Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters), dir. Mario Camerini Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Anna Magnani, Roma città aperta (Rome Open City) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Gino Cervi, Le miserie del signor Travet (His Young Wife), dir. Mario Soldati Best Cinematography: Mario Craveri, Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life) Best Musical Score: Enzo Masetti, Malìa (Spell), dir. Giuseppe Amato Best Documentary: La valle di Cassino (The Cassino Valley), dir. Giovanni Paolucci 1946–1947 Best Film: Paisà (Paisan), dir. Roberto Rossellini Best Director: Roberto Rossellini, Paisà Best Actress in a Leading Role: Alida Valli, Eugenia Grandet (Eugenie Grandet), dir. Mario Soldati Best Actor in a Leading Role: Amedeo Nazzari, Il bandito (The Bandit), dir. Alberto Lattuada Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Ave Ninchi, Vivere in pace (To Live in Peace), dir. Luigi Zampa Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Massimo Serrato, Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry), dir. Aldo Vergano Best Cinematography: Domenico Scala and Vaclav Vich, Daniele Cortis, dir. Mario Soldati Best Musical Score: Renzo Rossellini, Paisà Best Documentary: Bambini in città (Children in the City), dir. Luigi Comencini Special Nastro: Aldo Vergano, for Il sole sorge ancora; Walter Chiari, for his debut role in Vanità (Vanity), dir. Giorgio Pastina

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1947–1948 Best Film: Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth), dir. Pietro Germi Best Director: Alberto Lattuada, Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender); Giuseppe De Santis, Caccia tragica (The Tragic Hunt) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Magnani, L’onorevole Angelina (Angelina), dir. Luigi Zampa Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio De Sica, Cuore (Heart and Soul), dir. Duilio Coletti Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Vivi Gioi, Caccia tragica (The Tragic Hunt) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Nando Bruno, Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender) Best Screenplay: Gaspare Cataldo, Guido Pala, Alberto Vecchietti, I fratelli Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov), dir. Giacomo Gentilomo Best Cinematography: Piero Portalupi, Preludio d’amore (Shamed), dir. Giovanni Paolucci Best Musical Score: Renzo Rossellini, I fratelli Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov) Best Documentary: Piazza San Marco, dir. Francesco Pasinetti; Nettezza Urbana (City Cleaning Service), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Foreign Film: My Darling Clementine, dir. John Ford Special Nastro: L’ebreo errante (The Wandering Jew), dir. Goffredo Alessandrini 1948–1949 Best Film: Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Director: Vittorio De Sica, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Magnani, L’amore (Ways of Love), dir. Roberto Rossellini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Massimo Girotti, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law), dir. Pietro Germi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Giulietta Masina, Senza pietà (Without Pity), dir. Alberto Lattuada Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Saro Urzì, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law) Best Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Oreste Biancoli, Gerardo Guerrieri, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) Best Cinematography: Carlo Montuori, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)

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Best Musical Score: Alessandro Ciccognini, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) Best Documentary: Isole nella laguna (Islands in the Lagoon), dir. Luciano Emmer Best Foreign Film: Le diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh), dir. Claude Autant-Lara Special Nastro: Pietro Germi, In nome della legge (Bicycle Thieves); Renato Castellani, Sotto il sole di Roma 1949–1950 No acting awards this year. Director of Best Film: Augusto Genina, Cielo sulla palude (Heaven over the Marshes) Best Cinematography: G. R. Aldo, for entire body of work Best Musical Score: Roman Vlad, for his entire body of work Best Documentary: L’amorosa menzogna (Lies of Love), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Foreign Film: Henry V, dir. Laurence Olivier 1950–1951 Director of Best Film: Alessandro Blasetti, Prima comunione (Father’s Dilemma) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Maria Pierangeli, Domani è troppo tardi (Tomorrow Is Too Late), dir. Léonide Moguy Best Actor in a Leading Role: Aldo Fabrizi, Prima comunione (Father’s Dilemma) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Giulietta Masina, Luci del varietà (Variety Lights), dir. Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Umberto Spadaro, Il brigante Musolino (Outlaw Girl), dir. Mario Camerini Best Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Alessandro Blasetti, Prima comunione (Father’s Dilemma) Best Cinematography: Marco Scarpelli, Edera (Devotion), dir. Augusto Genina Best Musical Score: Giovanni Fusco, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Short Film: Notturno (Nocturne), dir. Vittorio Sala Best Foreign Film: Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder

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Special Nastro: Luigi Rovere, for all his productions; Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, for its human and stylistic qualities 1951–1952 Director of Best Film: Renato Castellani, Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents’ Worth of Hope) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Magnani, Bellissima, dir. Luchino Visconti Best Actor in a Leading Role: Totò, Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers), dir. Mario Monicelli and Steno Best Actress in a Supporting Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Supporting Role: not awarded Best Screenplay: Ettore M. Margadonna, Titina De Filippo, Renato Castellani, Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents’ Worth of Hope) Best Cinematography: Arturo Gallea, Due soldi di speranza (Two Cents’ Worth of Hope) Best Musical Score: Mario Nascimbene, Roma ore 11 (Rome 11.00), dir. Giuseppe De Santis Best Short Film: Metano (Methane), dir. Virgilio Sabel Best Foreign Film: A Place in the Sun, dir. George Stevens Special Nastro: Paolo Stoppa, for his entire career; Giulio Giannini, for the color cinematography of his documentary films 1952–1953 Director of Best Film: Luigi Zampa, Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial); Claudio Gora, La febbre di vivere (Eager to Live) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51, dir. Roberto Rossellini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Gabriele Ferzetti, La provinciale (The Wayward Wife), dir. Mario Soldati Best Actress in a Supporting Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Supporting Role: not awarded Best Screenplay: not awarded Best Cinematography: not awarded Best Musical Score: Valentino Bucchi, La febbre di vivere (Eager to Live) Best Short Film: not awarded Best Foreign Film: Limelight, dir. Charlie Chaplin Special Nastro: Gino Cervi, for all his screen performances; Enzo Serafin, for his entire career

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1953–1954 Producer of Best Film: Peg-Film and Cité Films, I vitelloni, dir. Federico Fellini Best Director: Federico Fellini, I vitelloni Best Actress in a Leading Role: Gina Lollobrigida, Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Nino Taranto, Anni facili (Easy Years), dir. Luigi Zampa Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Elisa Cegani, Tempi nostri, Zibaldone n.2 (The Anatomy of Love), dir. Alessandro Blasetti Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alberto Sordi, I vitelloni Best Screenplay: Vitaliano Brancati, Sergio Amidei, Vincenzo Talarico, Luigi Zampa, Anni facili (Easy Years) Best Cinematography: Mario Craveri, Magia verde (Green Magic), dir. Gian Gaspare Napolitano Best Musical Score: Mario Zafred, Cronache di poveri amanti (Chronicle of Poor Lovers), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Documentary: Magia Verde (Green Magic), dir. Gian Gaspare Napolitano Best Foreign Film: Little Fugitive, dir. Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin Special Nastro: Lea Padovani, for her entire acting career; Antonio Pietrangeli, for his directorial debut, Il sole negli occhi (Empty Eyes) 1954–1955 Producer of Best Film: Ponti–De Laurentiis, La strada, dir. Federico Fellini Best Director: Federico Fellini, La strada Best Actress in a Leading Role: Silvana Mangano, L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Giorni d’amore (Days of Love), dir. Giuseppe De Santis Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Tina Pica, Pane, amore e gelosia (Frisky), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Paolo Stoppa, L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples) Best Screenplay: Tullio Pinelli, Federico Fellini, La strada Best Cinematography: G. R. Aldo, Senso (The Wanton Countess), dir. Luchino Visconti (posthumous award) Best Musical Score: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Continente perduto (Lost Continent), dir. Enrico Gras, Giorgio Moser

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Best Documentary: not awarded Best Short Film: not awarded Best Foreign Film: On the Waterfront, dir. Elia Kazan Special Nastro: Mario Craveri, for use of Cinemascope in Continente perduto; Luchino Visconti, for Senso; Renato Castellani, for Romeo e Giulietta (Romeo and Juliet) 1955–1956 Producer of Best Film: Cines, Amici per la pelle (The Woman in the Painting), dir. Franco Rossi Best Director: Michelangelo Antonioni, Le amiche (The Girlfriends) Best Actress in a Leading Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Leading Role: Alberto Sordi, La scapolo (The Bachelor), dir. Antonio Pietrangeli Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Valentina Cortese, Le amiche (The Girlfriends) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Memmo Carotenuto, Il bigamo (The Bigamist), dir. Luciano Emmer Best Screenplay: Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massino Franciosa, Giuseppe Mancione, Gli innamorati (Wild Love), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Le amiche (The Girlfriends) Best Musical Score: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, Vertigine bianca (White Vertigo), dir. Giorgio Ferroni Best Short Film: Tempo di tonni (Time of the Tuna), dir. Vittorio Sala Best Foreign Film: Casque d’or, dir. Jacques Becker 1957 Producer of Best Film: ENIC–Ponti–De Laurentiis, Il ferroviere (Man of Iron), dir. Pietro Germi Best Director: Pietro Germi, Il ferroviere (Man of Iron) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Magnani, Suor Letizia (The Awakening), dir. Mario Camerini Best Actor in a Leading Role: not awarded Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Marisa Merlini, Tempo di villeggiatura (Time of Vacation), dir. Antonio Racioppi Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Peppino De Filippo, Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge (Totò, Peppino and the Outlaws), dir. Camillo Mastrocinque Best Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Il tetto (The Roof), dir. Vittorio De Sica

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Best Cinematography: Mario Criveri, L’impero del sole (The Empire in the Sun), dir. Enrico Gras Best Musical Score: Nino Rota, War and Peace, dir. King Vidor Best Short Film: Parma, città d’oro (Parma, Golden City), dir. Antonio Petrucci Best Foreign Film: Moby Dick, dir. John Huston 1958 Producer of Best Film: Dino De Laurentiis, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria), dir. Federico Fellini Best Director: Federico Fellini, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giulietta Masina, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Le notti bianche (White Nights), dir. Luchino Visconti Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Franca Marzi, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Andrea Cecchi, Parola di ladro (Honor among Thieves), dir. Nanni Loy, Gianni Puccini Best Screenplay: Valerio Zurlini, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Alberto Lattuada, Guendalina, dir. Alberto Lattuada Best Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Il grido, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Musical Score: Nino Rota, Le notti bianche (White Nights) Best Short Film: Giocare (Play), dir. Giulio Questi Best Foreign Film: 12 Angry Men, dir. Sidney Lumet 1959 Best Producer: Franco Cristaldi, La sfida (The Challenge), dir. Francesco Rosi; L’uomo di paglia (The Seducer—Man of Straw), dir. Pietro Germi; I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), dir. Mario Monicelli Director of Best Film: Pietro Germi, L’uomo di paglia (The Seducer— Man of Straw) Best Actress in a Leading Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio Gassman, I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Dorian Gray, Mogli pericolose (Dangerous Wives), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Nino Vingelli, La sfida (The Challenge)

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Best Screenplay: Age and Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Mario Monicelli, I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) Best Cinematography in B/W: Armando Nannuzzi, Giovani mariti (Young Husbands), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Cinematography in Color: Pier Ludovico Pavoni, La muraglia cinese (Behind the Great Wall), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Musical Score: Carlo Rustichelli, L’uomo di paglia (The Seducer— Man of Straw) Best Short Film: Paese d’America, dir. Gian Luigi Polidoro Director of Best Foreign Film: Stanley Kubrick, Paths of Glory 1960 Director of Best Film: Roberto Rossellini, Il Generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere) Best Producer: Goffredo Lombardo, for all his productions Best Actress in a Leading Role: Eleonora Rossi Drago, Estate violenta (Violent Summer), dir. Valerio Zurlini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Alberto Sordi, La grande guerra (The Great War), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Cristina Gaioni, Nella città l’inferno (. . . and the Wild Wild Women), dir. Renato Castellani Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Claudio Gora, Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder), dir. Pietro Germi Best Screenplay: Pietro Germi, Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Gianetti, Un maledetto imbroglio Best Cinematography in B/W: Gianni Di Venanzo, I magliari (The Swindlers), dir. Francesco Rosi Best Cinematography in Color: Gábor Pogány, Europa di notte (Europe by Night), dir. Alessandro Blasetti Best Musical Score: Mario Nascimbene, Estate violenta (Violent Summer) Best Short Film: I fratelli Rosselli (Fratelli Brothers), dir. Nelo Risi Director of Best Foreign Film: Ingmar Bergman, Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) 1961 Director of Best Film: Luchino Visconti, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) Best Producer: Dino De Laurentiis, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Sophia Loren, La ciociara (Two Women), dir. Vittorio De Sica

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Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, La dolce vita, dir. Federico Fellini Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Didi Perego, Kapò (Kapo), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Enrico Maria Salerno, La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43), dir. Florestano Vancini Best Screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) Best Cinematography in B/W: Giuseppe Rotunno, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) Best Cinematography in Color: Aldo Tonti, The Savage Innocents, dir. Nicholas Ray Best Musical Score: Giovanni Fusco, L’avventura, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Short Film: La casa delle vedove (The House of the Widows), dir. Gian Vittorio Baldi Best Experimental Short Film: Bambini nell’acquedotto (Children in the Aqueduct), dir. Giuseppe Ferrara Director of Best Foreign Film: Ingmar Bergman, Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) 1962 Director of Best Film: Michelangelo Antonioni, La notte (The Night) Best Producer: Alfredo Bini, La viaccia (The Lovemakers), dir. Mauro Bolognini, Accattone (Accattone!), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini Best Actress in a Leading Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style), dir. Pietro Germi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Monica Vitti, La notte (The Night) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Salvo Randone, L’assassino (The Assassin), dir. Elio Petri Best Screenplay: Ennio De Concini, Alfredo Giannetti, Pietro Germi, Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style) Best Cinematography in B/W: Vittorio De Seta, Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits at Orgosolo), dir. Vittorio De Seta Best Cinematography in Color: Alessandro D’Eva, Odissea nuda (Nude Odyssey), dir. Franco Rossi Best Musical Score: Giorgio Gaslini, La notte (The Night) Best Short Film: Dichiarazione d’amore (Declaration of Love), dir. Mario Gallo Director of Best Foreign Film: Stanley Kramer, Judgment at Nuremberg

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1963 Director of Best Film: Nanni Loy, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (The Four Days of Naples); Francesco Rosi, Salvatore Giuliano Best Producer: Goffredo Lombardo Best Actress in a Leading Role: Gina Lollobrigida, Venere imperiale (Imperial Venus), dir. Jean Delannoy Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio Gassman, Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), dir. Dino Risi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Regina Bianchi, Le quattro giornate di Napoli Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Romolo Valli, Una storia milanese (A Milanese Story), dir. Eriprando Visconti Best Screenplay: Massimo Franciosa, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Carlo Bernari, Nanni Loy, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (The Four Days of Naples) Best Cinematography in B/W: Gianni Di Venanzo, Salvatore Giuliano, dir. Francesco Rosi Best Cinematography in Color: Giuseppe Rotunno, Cronaca familiare (Family Portrait), dir. Valerio Zurlini Best Musical Score: Piero Piccioni, Salvatore Giuliano Best Director of Short Film: Mauro Severino, Chi è di scena (Who’s on Stage?) Director of Best Foreign Film: François Truffaut, Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) 1964 Director of Best Film: Federico Fellini, Otto e mezzo (8½) Best Producer: Angelo Rizzoli, Otto e mezzo (8½) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Silvana Mangano, Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Actor in a Leading Role: Ugo Tognazzi, Una storia moderna—l’ape regina (The Conjugal Bed), dir. Marco Ferreri Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sandra Milo, Otto e mezzo (8½) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Folco Lulli, I compagni (The Organizer), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, Otto e mezzo (8½) Best Cinematography in B/W: Gianni Di Venanzo, Otto e mezzo (8½) Best Cinematography in Color: Giuseppe Rotunno, Il gattopardo (The Leopard), dir. Luchino Visconti Best Musical Score: Nino Rota, Otto e mezzo (8½)

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Best Short Film: Mario Carbone, Stemmati di Calabria Director of Best Foreign Film: David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia 1965 Director of Best Film: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew) Best Producer: Franco Cristaldi, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Claudia Cardinale, La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Saro Urzì, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned), dir. Pietro Germi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Tecla Scarano, Matrimonio all’ italiana (Marriage Italian Style), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Leopoldo Trieste, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) Best Screenplay: Pietro Germi, Luciano Vincenzoni, Age and Scarpelli, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) Best Cinematography in B/W: Tonino Delli Colli, Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to St. Matthew) Best Cinematography in Color: Carlo Di Palma, Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), dir. Sergio Leone Best Short Film: not awarded Director of Best Foreign Film: Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1966 Director of Best Film: Antonio Pietrangeli, Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well) Best Producer: Marco Vicario, Sette uomini d’oro (Seven Golden Men), dir. Marco Vicario Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giovanna Ralli, La fuga (The Escape), dir. Paolo Spinola Best Actor in a Leading Role: Nino Manfredi, Questa volta parliamo di uomini (Let’s Talk about Men), dir. Lina Wertmüller Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sandra Milo, Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), dir. Federico Fellini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ugo Tognazzi, Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well)

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Best Screenplay: Ettore Scola, Antonio Pietrangeli, Ruggero Maccari, Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well) Best Cinematography in B/W: Armando Nannuzzi, Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra), dir. Luchino Visconti Best Cinematography in Color: Gianni Di Venanzo, Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits) Best Musical Score: Armando Trovajoli, Sette uomini d’oro (Seven Golden Men) Best Short Film: Raffaele Andreassi, Antonio Ligabue, pittore (Antonio Ligabue, Painter) Director of Best Foreign Film: Joseph Losey, The Servant 1967 Director of Best Film: Gillo Pontecorvo, La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) Best Producer: Antonio Musu, La battaglia di Algeri Best Actress in a Leading Role: Lisa Gastoni, Svegliati e uccidi (Wake up and Die), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Actor in a Leading Role: Totò, Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Olga Villi, Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians), dir. Pietro Germi Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Gastone Moschin, Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians) Best Screenplay: Age and Scarpelli, Pietro Germi, Luciano Vincenzoni, Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians) Best Cinematography in B/W: Marcello Gatti, La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo Best Cinematography in Color: Carlo Di Palma, L’armata Brancaleone (For Love and Gold), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Musical Score: Carlo Rustichelli, L’armata Brancaleone Director of Best Foreign Film: Claude Lelouch, Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) 1968 Director of Best Film: Elio Petri, A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way) Best Producer: Alfredo Bini, Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex), dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini Best Actress in a Leading Role: not awarded

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Best Actor in a Leading Role: Gian Maria Volonté, A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Maria Grazia Buccella, Ti ho sposato per allegria (I Married You for Fun), dir. Luciano Salce Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Gabriele Ferzetti, A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way) Best Screenplay: Ugo Pirro, Elio Petri, A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way) Best Cinematography in B/W: Tonino Delli Colli, La Cina è vicina (China Is Near), dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Cinematography in Color: Armando Nannuzzi, Incompreso (Misunderstood), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Musical Score: Mario Nascimbene, Pronto, c’è una certa Giuliana per te (Giuliana), dir. Massimo Franciosa Director of Best Foreign Film: Michelangelo Antonioni, Blowup (BlowUp) 1969 Director of Best Film: Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo and Juliet Best Producer: Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri, Il giorno della civetta (Mafia), dir. Damiano Damiani Best Actress in a Leading Role: Monica Vitti, La ragazza con la pistola (Girl with a Pistol), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actor in a Leading Role: Ugo Tognazzi, La bambolona (Baby Doll), dir. Franco Giraldi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Pupella Maggio, Il medico della mutua (Be Sick . . . It’s Free), dir. Luigi Zampa Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ettore Mattia, La pecora nera (The Black Sheep), dir. Luciano Salce Best Screenplay: Arduino Maiuri, Massimo De Rita, Carlo Lizzani, Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four), dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Cinematography in B/W: Aldo Scavarda, Grazie Zia (Come Play with Me), dir. Salvatore Samperi Best Cinematography in Color: Pasqualino De Santis, Romeo and Juliet, dir. Franco Zeffirelli Best Musical Score: Nino Rota, Romeo and Juliet Director of Best Foreign Film: Peter Brook, Marat-Sade; Robert Bresson, Mouchette

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1970 Director of Best Film: Luchino Visconti, La caduta degli dei (The Damned) Best Producer: Alberto Grimaldi, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Paola Pitagora, Senza sapere niente di lei (Without Knowing Anything about Her), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Nino Manfredi, Nell’anno del Signore (The Conspirators), dir. Luigi Magni Best Actress in a Supporting Role: not awarded Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Fanfulla, Fellini—Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon), dir. Federico Fellini; Umberto Orsini, La caduta degli dei Best Screenplay: Fabio Carpi, Nelo Risi, Diario di una schizofrenica (Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl), dir. Nelo Risi Best Cinematography in B/W: Vittorio Storaro, Giovinezza, giovinezza (Youth March), dir. Franco Rossi Best Cinematography in Color: Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini—Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon), dir. Federico Fellini Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Metti, una sera a cena (Love Circle), dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi Best Short Film: Bruno Bozzetto, Ego Director of Best Foreign Film: John Schlesinger, Midnight Cowboy 1971 Director of Best Film: Elio Petri, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion) Best Producer: Silvio Clementelli, Gott mit uns (God with Us), dir. Giuliano Montaldo Best Actress in a Leading Role: Ottavia Piccolo, Metello, dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Gian Maria Volonté, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Francesca Romana Coluzzi, Venga a prendere il caffè . . . da noi (Come Have Coffee with Us), dir. Alberto Lattuada Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Romolo Valli, Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Screenplay: Alberto Lattuada, Adriano Baracco, Tullio Kezich, Piero Chiara, Venga a prendere il caffè . . . da noi (Come Have Coffee with Us) Best Cinematography in B/W: Marcello Gatti, Sierra maestra (Sierra Master), dir. Ansano Giannarelli

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Best Cinematography in Color: Marcello Gatti, Anonimo veneziano (The Anonymous Venetian), dir. Enrico Maria Salerno Best Musical Score: Stelvio Cipriani, Anonimo veneziano (The Anonymous Venetian) Best Short Film: Paolo Saglietto, Il bambino (The Child) Director of Best Foreign Film: Costa-Gavras, L’aveu (The Confession) 1972 Director of Best Film: Luchino Visconti, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) Best Producer: Mario Cecchi Gori, for his entire production Best Emerging Director: Alberto Bevilacqua, La califfa (Lady Caliph) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Mariangela Melato, La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool), dir. Elio Petri Best Actor in a Leading Role: Riccardo Cucciolla, Sacco e Vanzetti (Sacco and Vanzetti), dir. Giuliano Montaldo Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Marina Berti, La califfa (Lady Caliph); Silvana Mangano, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Salvo Randone, La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool) Best Screenplay: Nino Manfredi, Piero De Bernardi, Leonardo Benvenuti, Per grazia ricevuta (Between Miracles), dir. Nino Manfredi Best Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Sacco e Vanzetti (Sacco and Vanzetti) Best Short Film: Bruno Bozzetto, Sottaceti (Pickles) Director of Best Foreign Film: Ken Russell, The Devils 1973 Director of Best Film: Bernardo Bertolucci, Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris) Best Producer: Alberto Grimaldi, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Mariangela Melato, Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimi), dir. Lina Wertmüller Best Actor in a Leading Role: Giancarlo Giannini, Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimi) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Lea Massari, La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer), dir. Valerio Zurlini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Mario Carotenuto, Lo scopone scientifico (The Scopone Game), dir. Luigi Comencini

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Best Screenplay: Alberto Bevilacqua, Questa specie d’amore (This Kind of Love), dir. Alberto Bevilacqua Best Cinematography: Ennio Guarnieri, Fratello sole, sorella luna (Brother Sun, Sister Moon), dir. Franco Zeffirelli Best Musical Score: Guido De Angelis, Maurizio De Angelis, . . . Più forte ragazzi! (All The Way Boys), dir. Giuseppe Colizzi Best Short Film: Giulio Gianini, Emanuele Luzzati, Pulcinella (Punch) Director of Best Foreign Film: Stanley Kubrick, Clockwork Orange 1974 Director of Best Film: Federico Fellini, Amarcord Best Emerging Director: Marco Leto, La villeggiatura (Black Holiday) Best Producer: Franco Cristaldi, for his entire production Best Actressin a Leading Role: Laura Antonelli, Malizia (Malice), dir. Salvatore Samperi Best Actor in a Leading Role: Giancarlo Giannini, Film d’amore e d’anarchia . . . (Love and Anarchy), dir. Lina Wertmüller Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Adriana Asti, Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation), dir. Vittorio De Sica Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Turi Ferro, Malizia (Malice) Best Screenplay: Tonino Guerra, Federico Fellini, Amarcord Best Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi, Ludwig, dir. Luchino Visconti Best Musical Score: Tony Renis, Blu Gang e vissero per sempre felici e ammazzati (Brothers Blue), dir. Luigi Bazzoni (as Marc Meyer) Best Short Film: Giuseppe Ferrara, La città del malessere (The City of Malaise) Director of Best Foreign Film: Ingmar Bergman, Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers) 1975 Director of Best Film: Luchino Visconti, Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece) Best Emerging Director: Luigi Di Gianni, Il tempo dell’inizio (The Time of the Beginning) Best Producer: Rusconi Film, Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Lisa Gastoni, Amore amaro (Bitter Love), dir. Florestano Vancini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio Gassman, Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman), dir. Dino Risi

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Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Giovanna Ralli, C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much), dir. Ettore Scola Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Aldo Fabrizi, C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much) Best Screenplay: Age and Scarpelli, Ettore Scola, C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much) Best Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (We All Loved Each Other So Much) Best Musical Score: Giancarlo Chiaramello, Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando), dir. Luca Ronconi Best Short Film: Bruno Bozzetto, Self-Service Director of Best Foreign Film: Luis Buñuel, Le fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty) 1976 Director of Best Film: Michelangelo Antonioni, Professione reporter (The Passenger) Best Emerging Director: Ennio Lorenzini, Quanto é bello lu murire acciso (How Wonderful to Die Assassinated) Best Producer: Andrea Rizzoli, Amici miei (My Friends), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actress in a Leading Role: Monica Vitti, L’anatra all’arancia (Duck in Orange Sauce), dir. Luciano Salce Best Actor in a Leading Role: Michele Placido, Marcia trionfale (Victory March), dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Maria Teresa Albani, Per le antiche scale (Down the Ancient Stairs), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ciccio Ingrassia, Todo modo, dir. Elio Petri Best Screenplay: Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Pietro Germi, Tullio Pinelli, Amici miei (My Friends), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli, Professione reporter (The Passenger) Best Musical Score: Adriano Celentano, Yuppi Du, dir. Adriano Celentano Director of Best Foreign Film: Miloš Forman, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Special Nastro: Pietro Germi, in memoriam

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1977 Director of Best Film: Valerio Zurlini, Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) Best Emerging Director: Giorgio Ferrara, Un cuore semplice (A Simple Heart) Best Producer: Edmondo Amati, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Mariangela Melato, Caro Michele (Dear Michael), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actor in a Leading Role: Alberto Sordi, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Adriana Asti, L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance), dir. Mauro Bolognini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Romolo Valli, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man) Best Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Mario Monicelli, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Casanova), dir. Federico Fellini Best Musical Score: Fred Buongusto, Oh, Serafina! (Oh! Serafina), dir. Alberto Lattuada Director of Best Foreign Film: Akira Kurosawa, Derzu Uzala Pietro Bianchi Award: Mario Soldati 1978 Director of Best Film: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Padre padrone Best Emerging Director: Sergio Nuti, Non contate su di noi (Don’t Count on Us) Best Producer: RAI-TV Best Actress in a Leading Role: Sophia Loren, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), dir. Ettore Scola Best Actor in a Leading Role: Nino Manfredi, In nome del papa re (In the Name of the Pope King), dir. Luigi Magni Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Virna Lisi, Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil), dir. Liliana Cavani Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Carlo Bagno, In nome del papa re (In the Name of the Pope King) Best Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, Maurizio Costanzo, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day) Best Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi, Jesus of Nazareth, dir. Franco Zeffirelli

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Best Musical Score: Armando Trovajoli, Una giornata particolare (A Special Day) Best Short Film: Elio Finestauri, Salvos ire, salvos venire (Leave Safely, Arrive Safely) Director of Best Foreign Film: Fred Zinnemann, Julia 1979 Director of Best Film: Ermanno Olmi, L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) Best Emerging Director: Salvatore Nocita, Ligabue Best Producer: RAI-TV Best Actress in a Leading Role: Mariangela Melato, Dimenticare Venezia (To Forget Venice), dir. Franco Brusati Best Actor in a Leading Role: Flavio Bucci, Ligabue Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Lea Massari, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), dir. Francesco Rosi Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Il giocattolo (I’ll Get a Gun), dir. Giuliano Montaldo Best Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi, L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) Best Cinematography: Ermanno Olmi, L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) Best Musical Score: Nino Rota, Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal), dir. Federico Fellini Director of Best Foreign Film: Ingmar Bergman, Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) 1980 Director of Best Film: Federico Fellini, La città delle donne (City of Women) Best Emerging Director: Maurizio Nichetti, Ratataplan Best Producer: Franco Cristaldi and Nicola Carraro, for entire Vides production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Ida Di Benedetto, Immacolata e Concetta (Immacolata and Concetta: The Other Jealousy), dir. Salvatore Piscicelli Best Actor in a Leading Role: Nino Manfredi, Café Express, dir. Nanni Loy Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Stafania Sandrelli, La terrazza (The Terrace), dir. Ettore Scola

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Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Tomas Milian, Luna, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Best Emerging Actress: Isabella Rossellini, Il prato (The Meadow), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Best Emerging Actor: Carlo Verdone, Un sacco bello (Fun Is Beautiful), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Screenplay: Age and Scarpelli, Ettore Scola, La terrazza (The Terrace) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, La città delle donne (City of Women) Best Musical Score: Fred Bongusto, La cicala (The Cricket), dir. Alberto Lattuada Director of Best Foreign Film: Woody Allen, Manhattan 1981 Director of Best Film: Francesco Rosi, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Emerging Director: Massimo Troisi, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three) Best Producer: Fulvio Lucisano and Mauro Berardi, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Mariangela Melato, Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Ida Di Benedetto, Fontamara, dir. Carlo Lizzani Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Massimo Girotti, Passione d’amore (Passion of Love), dir. Ettore Scola Best Emerging Actress: Carla Fracci, La vera storia della signora dalle camelie (Lady of the Camelias), dir. Mauro Bolognini; Elena Fabrizi, Bianco, rosso e Verdone (White, Red and Green), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Emerging Actor: Massimo Troisi, Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three) Best Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, Passione d’amore (Passion of Love) Best Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) Best Musical Score: Riz Ortolani, Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream) Director of Best Foreign Film: Akira Kurosawa, Kagemusha

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1982 Director of Best Film: Marco Ferreri, Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness) Best Emerging Director: Alessandro Benvenuti, Ad ovest di Paperino (West of Paperino) Best Producer: Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, for all their productions Best Actress in a Leading Role: Eleonora Giorgi, Borotalco, dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor in a Leading Role: Ugo Tognazzi, Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Claudia Cardinale, La pelle (The Skin), dir. Liliana Cavani Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Paolo Stoppa, Il marchese del Grillo (The Marquis of Grillo), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Emerging Actress: Marina Suma, Le occasioni di Rosa (Rosa’s Opportunities), dir. Salvatore Piscicelli Best Emerging Actor: Beppe Grillo, Cercando Gesù (Looking for Jesus), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Screenplay: Bernardino Zapponi, Leonardo Benvenuti, Mario Monicelli, Tullio Pinelli, Piero De Bernardi, Il marchese del Grillo (The Marquis of Grillo) Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Storie di ordinaria follia (Tales of Ordinary Madness) Best Musical Score: Lucio Dalla, Fabio Liberatori, Borotalco Best Short Film: Claudio Racca, Ballare è bello (Dancing Is Great) Director of Best Foreign Film: Istvan Szabó, Mephisto 1983 Director of Best Film: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars) Best Emerging Director: Franco Piavoli, Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet) Best Producer: RAI-TV Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giuliana De Sio, Io, Chiara e lo scuro (The Pool Hustlers), dir. Maurizio Ponzi Best Actor in a Leading Role: Francesco Nuti, Io, Chiara e lo scuro (The Pool Hustlers) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Virna Lisi, Sapore di mare (Time for Loving), dir. Carlo Vanzina Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Tino Schirinzi, Sciopèn (Chopin), dir. Luciano Odorisio

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Best Emerging Actress: not awarded Best Emerging Actor: Fausto Rossi, Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart), dir. Gianni Amelio Best Screenplay: Vittorio Taviani, Paolo Taviani, Tonino Guerra, Giuliani G. De Negri, La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars) Best Cinematography: Ennio Guarnieri, La traviata, dir. Franco Zeffirelli Best Musical Score: Angelo Branduardi, State buoni se potete (Be Good If You Can), dir. Luigi Magni Best Short Film: Aldo Bassan, Terra amara (Bitter Earth) Director of Best Foreign Film: Richard Attenborough, Gandhi 1984 Director of Best Film: Federico Fellini, E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On); Pupi Avati, Una gita scolastica (A School Outing) Best Emerging Director: Gabriele Lavia, Il principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg) Best Producer: Gianni Minervini, Mi manda Picone (Where's Picone?), dir. Nanni Loy Best Actress in a Leading Role: Lina Sastri, Mi manda Picone (Where's Picone?) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Carlo Delle Piane, Una gita scolastica (A School Trip), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Monica Scattini, Lontano da dove (Far from Where), dir. Stefania Casini, Francesca Marciano Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Leo Gulotta, Mi manda picone (Where's Picone?) Best Emerging Actress: Lidia Broccolino, Una gita scolastica (A School Trip) Best Emerging Actor: not awarded Best Screenplay: Nanni Loy, Elvio Porta, Mi manda Picone (Where's Picone?) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) Best Musical Score: Riz Ortolani, Una gita scolastica (A School Trip) Best Short Story: Berto Bozza, USA profondo sud (USA Deep South) Director of Best Foreign Film: Ingmar Bergman, Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) Special Nastro: Barbra Streisand, Yentl

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1985 Director of Best Film: Sergio Leone, C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America) Best Emerging Director: Luciano Da Crescenzo, Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spake Bellavista) Best Producer: Fulvio Lucisano, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Claudia Cardinale, Claretta (Claretta Petacci), dir. Pasquale Squitieri Best Actor in a Leading Role: Michele Placido, Pizza Connection (The Sicilian Connection), dir. Damiano Damiani Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Marina Confalone, Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spake Bellavista) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Leopoldo Trieste, Enrico IV (Henry IV), dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Emerging Actress: Giulia Boschi, Pianoforte, dir. Francesca Comencini Best Emerging Actor: not awarded Best Screenplay: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Tonino Guerra, Kaos, dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America) Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, C’era una volta in America (Once upon a Time in America) Best Short Film: Giancarlo Pancaldi, Effetto nebbia (Effects of Fog) Director of Best Foreign Film: Miloš Forman, Amadeus 1986 Director of Best Film: Mario Monicelli, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Emerging Director: Enrico Montesano, A me mi piace (I Like It) Best Producer: Fulvia Lucisano, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giulietta Masina, Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), dir. Federico Fellini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Isa Danieli, Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime), dir. Lina Wertmüller Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Gastone Moschin, Amici miei, atto III (All My Friends, Part 3), dir. Nanni Loy

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Best Emerging Actress: Enrica Maria Scrivano, The Berlin Affair, dir. Liliana Cavani Best Emerging Actor: Elvio Porta, Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) Best Screenplay: Leo Benvenuti, Mario Monicelli, Tullio Pinelli, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Piero De Bernardi, Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl) Best Cinematography: Marcello Gatti, Inganni (Deceptions), dir. Luigi Faccini Best Musical Score: Tony Esposito, Un complicato intrigodi donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra: A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) Best Short Film: Ermanno Olmi, Milano ’83 Director of Best Foreign Film: Sydney Pollack, Out of Africa Promotional Silver Ribbon: Luigi Faccini, Inganni (Deceptions) 1987 Director of Best Film: Ettore Scola, La famiglia (The Family) Best Emerging Director: Giuseppe Tornatore, II camorrista (The Professor) Best Producer: Franco Committeri, La famiglia (The Family) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Valeria Golino, Storia d’amore (Love Story), dir. Francesco Maselli Best Actor in a Leading Role: Roberto Benigni, Down by Law, dir. Jim Jarmusch Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Ottavia Piccolo, La famiglia (The Family) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Diego Abatantuono, Regalo di Natale (Christmas Present), dir. Pupi Avati Best Screenplay: Furio Scarpelli, Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, La famiglia (The Family) Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Der Name der Rose (The Name of the Rose), dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud Best Musical Score: Giovanni Nuti, Stregati (Bewitched), dir. Francesco Nuti; Armando Trovajoli, La famiglia (The Family); Riz Ortolani, L’inchiesta (The Inquiry), dir. Damiano Damiani Best Short Film: Folco Quilici, Codex purpureus rossanensis Director of Best Foreign Film: Betrand Tavernier, Round Midnight Special Nastro: Cinecittà, for its 50 years of filmmaking

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1988 Director of Best Film: Bernardo Bertolucci, L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) Best Emerging Director: Carlo Mazzacurati, Notte italiana (Italian Night) Best Producer: Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo Best Actress in a Leading Role: Ornella Muti, Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I), dir. Carlo Verdone Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Oci Ciornie (Dark Eyes), dir. Nikita Mikhalkov Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Elena Sofia Ricci, Io e mia sorella (My Sister and I) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Enzo Cannavale, 32 dicembre (32 December), dir. Luciano De Crescenzo Best Female Dubbing: Ludovica Modugno, voice of Cher in Moonstruck, dir. Norman Jewison Best Male Dubbing: Giuseppe Rinaldi, voice of Peter O’Toole in L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) Best Screenplay: Massimo Troisi, Anna Pavignano, Le vie del Signore sone finite (The Ways of the Lord Are Finite), dir. Massimo Troisi Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, L’ultimo imperatore Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, The Untouchables, dir. Brian De Palma Best Short Film: Luigi Di Gianni, L’arte del vetro (The Art of Glass) Director of Best Foreign Film: Louis Malle, Au revoir les enfants 1989 Introduction of Nastro for Best European Film or Filmmaker. Director of Best Film: Ermanno Olmi, La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) Best Emerging Director: Francesca Archibugi, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay) Best Producer: Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, for their entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Ornella Muti, Codice privato (Private Access), dir. Francesco Maselli Best Actor in a Leading Role: Gian Maria Volonté, L’oeuvre au noir (The Abyss), dir. André Delvaux Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Stefania Sandrelli, Mignon è partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Fabio Bussotti, Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi), dir. Liliana Cavani

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Best Female Dubbing: Marzia Ubaldi, voice of Gena Rowlands in Another Woman, dir. Woody Allen Best Male Dubbing: Paolo Maria Scalondro, voice of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, dir. David Cronenberg Best Screenplay: Tullio Kezich, Ermanno Olmi, La leggenda del santo bevitore bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) Best Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli, Splendor, dir. Ettore Scola Best Musical Score: Eugenio Bennato, Carlo D’Angi, Cavalli si nasce (Horses Are Born), dir. Sergio Staino European Nastro: John Cleese, A Fish Called Wanda Director of Best Foreign Film: Pedro Almodóvar, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de “nervios” (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) 1990 Director of Best Film: Pupi Avati, Storia di ragazzi e di ragazze (The Story of Boys and Girls) Best Emerging Director: Ricky Tognazzi, Piccoli equivoci (Little Misunderstandings) Best Producer: Claudio Bonivento, Mery per sempre (Forever Mary), dir. Marco Risi Best Actress in a Leading Role: Virna Lisi, Buon Natale, Buon Anno (Merry Christmas . . . Happy New Year), dir. Luigi Comencini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Vittorio Gassman, Lo zio indegno (The Sleazy Uncle), dir. Franco Brusati Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Nancy Brilli, Piccoli equivoci (Little Misunderstandings) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alessandro Haber, Willy Signori e vengo da lontano (Willy Signori and I Come from Afar), dir. Francesco Nuti Best Female Dubbing: Simona Izzo, voice of Jacqueline Bisset in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, dir. Paul Bartel Best Male Dubbing: Roberto Chevalier, voice of Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio, dir. Oliver Stone Best Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Storie di ragazzi e ragazze (The Story of Boys and Girls) Best Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, dir. Terry Gilliam Best Musical Score: Claudio Mattone, Scugnizzi (Street Kids), dir. Nanni Loy European Nastro: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Dekalog Director of Best Foreign Film: Peter Weir, Dead Poets Society

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621

1991 Director of Best Film: Gianni Amelio, Porte aperte (Open Doors) Best Emerging Director: Sergio Rubini, La stazione (The Station) Best Producer: Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, for their entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Margherita Buy, La stazione Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Mastroianni, Verso sera (Towards Evening), dir. Francesca Archibugi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Zoe Incrocci, Verso sera (Towards Evening) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ennio Fantastichini, Porte aperte (Open Doors) Best Female Dubbing: Micaela Giustiniani, voice of Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, dir. Bruce Beresford Best Male Dubbing: Tonino Accolla, voice of Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, dir. Kenneth Branagh Best Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Tonino Guerra, Il male oscuro (Dark Illness), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, Il tè nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, for La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon), dir. Federico Fellini; In nome del popolo sovrano (In the Name of the Sovereign People), dir. Luigi Magni; Il male oscuro (Dark Illness); and Il sole anche di notte (Dark Sun), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Best Short Film: Ursula Ferrara, Amore asimmetrico (Asymetrical Love) European Nastro: Philippe Noiret Director of Best Foreign Film: Luc Besson, La femme Nikita (Nikita) 1992 Director of Best Film: Gabriele Salvatores, Mediterraneo Best Emerging Director: Antonio Capuano, Vito e gli altri (Vito and the Others) Best Producer: Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo, Il portaborse (The Yes Man), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Actress in a Leading Role: Francesca Neri, Pensavo fosse amore invece era un calesse (I Thought It Was Love), dir. Massimo Troisi Best Actor in a Leading Role: Roberto Benigni, Johnny Stecchino, dir. Roberto Benigni Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Ilaria Occhini, Benvenuti a casa Gori (Welcome to the Gori House), dir. Alessandro Benvenuti Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Paolo Bonacelli, Johnny Stecchino

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Best Female Dubbing: Rossella Izzo, voice of Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise, dir. Ridley Scott Best Male Dubbing: Pino Locchi, voice of Charles Bronson in The Indian Runner, dir. Sean Penn Best Screenplay: Andrea Barbato, Emidio Greco, Una storia semplice (A Simple Story), dir. Emidio Greco Best Cinematography: Pasquale Rachini, Bix, dir. Pupi Avati Best Musical Score: Pino Daniele, Pensavo fosse amore invece era un calesse (I Thought It Was Love) Best Short Film: Flavia Alman, Mario Canali, Enigmatic Ages European Nastro: István Szabó, Meeting Venus Director of Best Foreign Film: Mira Nair, Mississippi Masala 1993 Director of Best Film: Gianni Amelio, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) Best Emerging Director: Mario Martone, Morte di un matematico napoletano (Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician) Best Producer: Angelo Rizzoli, for his entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Antonella Ponziani, Verso sud (Towards the South), dir. Pasquale Pozzessere Best Actor in a Leading Role: Diego Abatantuono, Puerto Escondido, dir. Gabriele Salvatores Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Paola Quattrini, Fratelli e sorelle (Brothers and Sisters), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Renato Carpentieri, Puerto Escondido Best Female Dubbing: Carla Cassola, voice of Tilda Swinton in Orlando, dir. Sally Potter Best Male Dubbing: Massimo Corvo, voice of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, dir. Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise Best Screenplay: Gianni Amelio, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli, Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) Best Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma, Shadows and Fog, dir. Woody Allen Best Musical Score: Manuel De Sica, Al lupo al lupo (Wolf! Wolf!) Best Short Film: Valerio Andrei, Il dono dei magi (The Gift of the Magi) European Nastro: Aki Kaurismäki, Boheemielämää (La vie de Bohème) Director of Best Foreign Film: Robert Altman, The Player Honorary Nastro: Michelangelo Antonioni

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623

1994 Director of Best Italian Film: Nanni Moretti, Caro diario (Dear Diary) Best Emerging Director: Pappi Corsicato, Libera Best Italian Producer: Leo Pescarolo, Fulvio Lucisano, and Guido De Laurentiis, Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin), dir. Francesca Archibugi Best Actress in a Leading Role: Chiara Caselli, Dove siete? Io sono qui (Where Are You? I’m Here), dir. Liliana Cavani Best Actor in a Leading Role: Paolo Villaggio, Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Woods), dir. Ermanno Olmi Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Milena Vukotic, Fantozzi in paradiso (Fantozzi in Heaven), dir. Neri Parenti Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alessandro Haber, Per amore, solo per amore (For Love, Only for Love), dir. Giovanni Veronesi Best Female Dubbing: Alessandra Korompay, voice of Juliette Binoche in Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours Blue), dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski Best Male Dubbing: Giancarlo Giannini, voice of Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way, dir. Brian De Palma Best Screenplay: Francesca Archibugi, Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin) Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, Little Buddha, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Best Musical Score: Federico De Robertis, Sud (South), dir. Gabriele Salvatores Best Short Film: Andrea Marzari, La caccia (The Hunt) European Nastro: Ken Loach, Raining Stones Director of Best Foreign Film: Robert Altman, Short Cuts 1995 Director of Best Italian Film: Gianni Amelio, Lamerica Best Emerging Director: Paolo Virzì, La bella vita (Living It Up) Best Producer: Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, for entire production Best Actress in a Leading Role: Sabrina Ferilli, La bella vita (Living It Up) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Alessandro Haber, La vera vita di Antonio H (The True Life of Antonio H.), dir. Enzo Monteleone Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Virna Lisi, La reine Margot (Queen Margot), dir. Patrice Chéreau Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Marco Messeri, Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes), dir. Francesca Archibugi

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Best Female Dubbing: Emanuela Rossi, voice of Debra Winger in Shadowlands, dir. Richard Attenborough Best Male Dubbing: Carlo Valli, voice of Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, dir. Chris Columbus Best Screenplay: Alessandro D’Alatri, Senza pelle (Without Skin), dir. Alessandro D’Alatri Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Lamerica Best Musical Score: Luis Bacalov, Il postino (The Postman), dir. Michael Radford, Massimo Troisi Best Short Film: Giuseppe Gandini, Mito della realtà (Myth of Reality) European Nastro: Alain Resnais, Smoking / No Smoking Director of Best Foreign Film: James Ivory, The Remains of the Day Special Nastro: Massimo Troisi (posthumous) Honorary Nastro: Sophia Loren 1996 Director of Best Italian Film: Giuseppe Tornatore, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Emerging Director: Sandro Baldoni, Strane storie (Weird Tales) Best Producer: Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo, La seconda volta (The Second Time), dir. Mimmo Calopresti Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Bonaiuto, L’amore molesto (Nasty Love), dir. Mario Martone Best Actor in a Leading Role: Sergio Castellitto, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Regina Bianchi, Camerieri (Waiters), dir. Leone Pompucci Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Leopoldo Trieste, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Female Dubbing: Antonella Rendina, voice of Bridget Fonda in Rough Magic, dir. Claire Peploe Best Male Dubbing: Luca Biagini, voice of Billy Crystal in Forget Paris, dir. Billy Crystal Best Screenplay: Leone Pompucci, Filippo Pichi, Paolo Rossi, Camerieri Best Cinematography: Dante Spinotti, L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker) Best Musical Score: Lucio Dalla, Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders Best Short Film: Andrea Zaccariello, Gioco da vecchi (Old Man’s Games); Roberto Palmerini, Scooter

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Special Mention Short Film: Maurizio Fiume, Drogheria (Drug Store); Cecilia Calvi, Il vampiro difettoso (The Flawed Vampire); Monica Vullo, Tre minuti a mezzanotte (Three Minutes to Midnight) European Nastro: Theodoros Angelopoulos, To vlemma tou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze) Director of Best Foreign Film: Theodoros Angelopoulos, To vlemma tou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze) Special Nastro: Ingmar Bergman 1997 Director of Best Italian Film: Maurizio Nichetti, Luna e l’altra (Luna and the Other) Best Emerging Director: Roberto Cimpanelli, Un inverno freddo freddo (A Cold, Cold Winter) Best Italian Producer: Antonio and Pupi Avati, and Aurelio De Laurentiis, Festival, dir. Pupi Avati Best Actress in a Leading Role: Virna Lisi, Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart), dir. Cristina Comencini; Iaia Forte, Luna e l’altra (Luna and the Other) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Leonardo Pieraccioni, Il ciclone (The Cyclone), dir. Leonardo Pieraccioni Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Lucia Poli, Albergo Roma (Hotel Roma), dir. Ugo Chiti Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Gianni Cavina, Festival Best Female Dubbing: Aurora Cancian, voice of Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies, dir. Mike Leigh Best Male Dubbing: Gigi Proietti, voice of Robert De Niro in Casino, dir. Martin Scorsese Best Screenplay: Giovanni Veronesi, Leonardo Pieraccioni, Il ciclone (The Cyclone) Best Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma, Mighty Aphrodite, dir. Woody Allen Best Musical Score: Paolo Conte, La freccia azzurra (How the Toys Saved Christmas), dir. Enzo D’Alò Best Short Film: Ago Panini, Scorpioni (Scorpions) Special Mention Short Film: César Menighetti, Elisabetta Pandimiglio, Punti di Vista (Points of View) European Nastro: Alan Parker, Evita Director of Best Foreign Film: Mike Leigh, Secrets and Lies Special Nastro: Marcello Mastronianni (posthumous); La freccia azzurra (How the Toys Saved Christmas)

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1998 Director of Best Italian Film: Roberto Benigni, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Emerging Director: Roberta Torre, Tano da morire (To Die for Tano) Best Italian Producer: Marco Risi, Maurizio Tedesco, Il bagno turco (Hamam: The Turkish Bath), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actress in a Leading Role: Francesca Neri, Carne trémula (Live Flesh), dir. Pedro Almodóvar Best Actor in a Leading Role: Roberto Benigni, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), dir. Roberto Benigni Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Mimma De Rosalia, Maria Aliotta, Annamaria Confalone, Adele Aliotta, Francesca Di Cesare, Eleonora Teriaca, Concetta Alfano, Antonia Uzzo (entire female cast), Tano da morire (To Die for Tano) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Giustino Durano, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Female Dubbing: Rita Savagnone, voice of Vanessa Redgrave in Mrs. Dalloway, dir. Marleen Gorris Best Male Dubbing: Massimo Popolizio, voice of Kenneth Branagh in Hamlet, dir. Kenneth Branagh Best Screenplay: Roberto Benigni, Vincenzo Cerami, La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) Best Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli, Marianna Ucrìa, dir. Roberto Faenza Best Musical Score: Nino D’Angelo, Tano da morire (To Die for Tano) Best Short Film: Dario Migliardi, La lettera (The Letter) European Nastro: Jerzy Stuhr, Historie milosne (Love Stories) Special Mention Short Film: Ruggero Dipaolo, La madre (The Mother); Sergio Russo, La carabina (The Carbine) European Nastro: Jerzy Stuhr, Historie milosne (Love Stories) Director of Best Foreign Film: Pedro Almodóvar, Carne trémula (Live Flesh) Special Nastro: Anna Maria Tatò, Marcello Mastroianni: Mi ricordo, sì, io mi ricordo (Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember); Aldo Baglio, Giacomo Poretti, Giovanni Storti, Tre uomini e una gamba (Three Men and a Leg) Honorary Nastro: Nino Baragli

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1999 Director of Best Italian Film: Giuseppe Tornatore, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Emerging Director: Luciano Ligabue, Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow) Best Producer: Medusa Film, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Del perduto amore (Of Lost Love), dir. Michele Placido Best Actor in a Leading Role: Giancarlo Giannini, La stanza dello scirocco (The Room of the Scirocco), dir. Maurizio Sciarrra Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Stefania Sandrelli, La cena (The Dinner), dir. Ettore Scola Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Antonio Catania, Riccardo Garrone, Vittorio Gassman, Giancarlo Giannini, Adalberto Merli, Eros Pagni, Stefano Antonucci, Giorgio Colangeli, Giuseppe Gandini, Walter Lupo, Paolo Merloni, Carlo Molfese, Sergio Nicolai, Corrado Olmi, Mario Patanè, Pier Francesco Poggi, Francesco Siciliano, Giorgio Tirabassi, Venantino Venantini, Andrea Cambi (ensemble male cast), La cena (The Dinner) Best Female Dubbing: Graziella Polesinanti, voice of Fernanda Montenegro in Central do Brazil (Central Station), dir. Walter Salles Best Male Dubbing: Roberto Pedicini, voice of Jim Carrey, The Truman Show, dir. Peter Weir Best Screenplay: Giuseppe Tornatore, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900) Best Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro, Tango, dir. Carlos Saura Best Musical Score: Eugenio Bennato, La stanza dello scirocco (The Room of the Scirocco), dir. Maurizio Sciarra Best Song: Luciano Lugabue, Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow) Best Short Film: Giulio Manfredonia, Tanti auguri (Best Wishes) Special Mention Short Film: Claudia Poggiani, Bagaglio a mano (Hand Luggage) European Nastro: Radu Mihaileanu, Train de vie (Train of Life) Director of Best Foreign Film: Steven Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan Special Nastro: Enzo D’Alò, La gabbianella e il gatto (Lucky and Zorba); Ennio Morricone, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900), for musical research in order to compose the music 2000 Director of Best Italian Film: Silvio Soldini, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips)

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Best Emerging Director: Alessandro Piva, La Capagira (My Head Is Spinning) Best Producer: Francesco Tomatore, Giuseppe Tomatore, Il manoscritto del principe (The Prince’s Manuscript), dir. Roberto Andò Best Actress in a Leading Role: Licia Maglietta, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Silvio Orlando, Preferisco il rumore del mare (I Prefer the Sound of the Sea), dir. Mimmo Calopresti Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Marina Massironi, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Felice Andreasi, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Female Dubbing: Tatiana Dessi, voice of Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, dir. Kimberley Peirce Best Male Dubbing: Roberto Chevalier, voice of Tom Cruise in Magnolia, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson Best Screenplay: Silvio Soldini, Doriana Leondeff, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips) Best Cinematography: Dante Spinotti, The Insider, dir. Michael Mann Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Canone inverso (Canone inverso—Making Love), dir. Ricky Tognazzi Best Short Film: Chiara Caselli, Per sempre (Forever) European Nastro: Claudia Cardinale Director of Best Foreign Film: Sam Mendes, American Beauty Special Nastro: Vittorio Gassman (posthumously); Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible II, for producing and acting in the film 2001 Director of Best Italian Film: Nanni Moretti, La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room) Best Emerging Director: Alex Infascelli, Almost Blue Best Producer: Tilde Corsi and Gianni Romoli, Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actress in a Leading Role: Margherita Buy, Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Stefano Accorsi, Le fate ignoranti (His Secret Life) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Stefania Sandrelli, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss), dir. Gabriele Muccino Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Giancarlo Giannini, Hannibal, dir. Ridley Scott

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Best Female Dubbing: Franca d’Amato, voice of Juliette Binoche in Chocolat (Chocolate), dir. Lasse Hallström Best Male Dubbing: Michele Gammino, voice of Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath, dir. Robert Zemeckis Best Screenplay: Claudio Fava, Monica Zapelli, Marco Tullio Giordana, I cento passi (One Hundred Steps), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Cinematography: Fabio Olmi, Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), dir. Ermanno Olmi Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, Malèna, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore Best Song: Carmen Consoli, L’ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss) Best Short Film: Corrado Franco, L’ultima questione (Last Matter); Giovanna Sonnino, Rimedi contro l’amore (Remedies against Love) Special Mention Short Film: Syusy Blady, Ciccio colonna ; Jerome Bellavista Caltagirone, Quid pro quo European Nastro: Emir Kusturica, Super 8 Stories Director of Best Foreign Film: Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot Special Nastro: Armando Trovajoli Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Jasmine Trinca; Jamie Bell 2002 Director of Best Italian Film: Marco Bellocchio, L’ora di religione (The Religion Hour—My Mother’s Smile) Best Emerging Director: Paolo Sorrentino, L’uomo in più (One Man Up) Best Producer: Fandango, Respiro (Respiro: Grazia’s Island), dir. Emanuele Crialese Best Actress in a Leading Role: Valeria Golino, Respiro (Respiro: Grazia’s Island) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Sergio Castellitto, L’ora di religione (The Religion Hour; My Mother’s Smile) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Margherita Buy, Virna Lisi, Sandra Ceccarelli, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life), dir. Cristina Comencini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Leo Gullotta, Vajont: La diga del disonore (Vajont: Dam of Shame), dir. Renzo Martinelli Best Screenplay: Cristina Comencini, Lucilla Schiaffino, Giulia Calenda, Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Brucio nel vento (Burning in the Wind), dir. Silvio Soldini Best Musical Score: Edoardo Bennato, Il principe e il pirata (The Prince and the Pirate), dir. Leonardo Pieraccioni Best Song: Gianna Nannini, Momo alla conquista del tempo (Momo), dir. Enzo D’Alò

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Best Short Film: Emiliano Corapi, La storia chiusa (The Closed Story) Special Mention Short Film: Stella Leonetti, Vernissage!1607, Caravaggio European Nastro: Pedro Almodóvar, Hable con ella (Talk to Her) Director of Best Foreign Film: Robert Altman, Gosford Park Special Nastro: Ferruccio Amendola (posthumously) Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Adriano Giannini 2003 Director of Best Italian Film: Gabriele Salvatores, Io non ho paura (I’m Not Scared) Best Emerging Director: Maria Sole Tognazzi, Passato prossimo (Past Perfect) Best Producer: Fandango, for L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer), dir. Matteo Garrone; Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love), dir. Gabriele Muccino; and Velocità massima (Maximum Velocity), dir. Daniele Vicari Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giovanna Mezzogiomo, Ilaria Alpi, il più crudele dei giorni (The Cruelest Day), dir. Ferdinanda Vicentini Orgnani; La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actor in a Leading Role: Gigi Proietti, Febbre da cavallo: La Mandrakata (Horse Fever: The Mandrake Sting), dir. Carlo Vanzina; Neri Marcorè, Il cuore altrove (Incantato), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Monica Bellucci, Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Diego Abatantuono, Io non ho paura (I’m Not Scared) Best Dubbing: Pino Insegno, voice of Viggo Mortensen in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, dir. Peter Jackson; voice of Denis Leary in Ice Age, dir. Chris Wedge Best Screenplay: Gabriele Muccino, Heidrun Schleef, Ricordati di me (Remember Me, My Love) Best Cinematography: Italo Petriccione, Io non ho paura (I’m Not Scared) Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, Pinocchio, dir. Roberto Benigni Best Song: Giorgia, La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Special Mention Short Film: Manuela Mancini, Nightswimming Director of Best Foreign Film: Roman Polanski, The Pianist Special Nastro: Alberto Sordi (posthumously); Carlo Verdone; Luis Bacalov Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Silvio Muccino, Nicoletta Romanoff

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2004 Director of Best Italian Film: Marco Tullio Giordana, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Emerging Director: Franco Battiato, Perduto amor (Lost Love) Best Producer: Angelo Barbagallo, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Adriana Asti, Sonia Bergamasco, Maya Sansa, Jasmine Trinca, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Roberto Herlitzka, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), dir. Marco Bellocchio, Alessio Boni, Fabrizio Gifuni, Luigi Lo Cascio, Andrea Tidona, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Margherita Buy, Caterina va in città (Caterina in the Big City), dir. Paolo Virzì Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Arnoldo Foá, Gente di Roma (People of Rome), dir. Ettore Scola Best Dubbing: Luca Zingaretti, voice of Marlin in Finding Nemo, dir. Andrew Stanton Best Screenplay: Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) Best Cinematography: Fabio Olmi, Cantando dietro i paraventi (Singing behind the Screens), dir. Ermanno Olmi Best Musical Score: Paolo Fresu, L’isola (The Island), dir. Costanza Quatriglio Best Song: Lucio Dalla, Prima dammi un bacio (Kiss Me First), dir. Ambrogio Lo Giudice Special Mention Short Film: Manuela Mancini, On the Loose Special Mention Best Documentary: César Meneghetti, Elisabetta Pandimiglio, Sogni di cuoio (Leather Dreams) European Nastro: Fanny Ardant Director of Best Foreign Film: Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Corrado Fortuna, Alice Teghill 2005 Director of Best Italian Film: Gianni Amelio, Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House) Best Emerging Director: Saverio Costanzo, Private Best Producer: Aurelio De Laurentiis, Che ne sarà di noi (What Will Happen to Us), dir. Giovanni Veronesi; Tutto in quella notte (Everything That Night), dir. Franco Bertini Best Actress in a Leading Role: Laura Morante, L’amore è eterno finché dura (Love Is Eternal While It Lasts), dir. Carlo Verdone

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Best Actor in a Leading Role: Toni Servillo, Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love), dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, L’amore ritorna (Love Returns), dir. Sergio Rubini Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Raffaele Pisu, Le conseguenze dell’ amore (The Consequences of Love) Best Screenplay: Margaret Mazzantini, Sergio Castellitto, Non ti muovere (Don’t Move), dir. Sergio Castellito Best Female Dubbing: Cristina Boraschi, voice of Julia Roberts in Closer, dir. Mike Nichols Best Male Dubbing: Francesco Pannofino, voice of Clive Owen in Closer Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, for Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House); Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love); and Ovunque sei (Another Life), dir. Michele Placido Best Musical Score: Banda Osiris, Primo amore (First Love), dir. Matteo Garrone Best Song: Vasco Rossi, Non ti muovere (Don’t Move) Special Mention Short Film: Cecilia Dazzi, Sotto le foglie (Under the Leaves) European Nastro: Malcolm McDowell, Evilenko, dir. David Grieco Director of Best Foreign Film: Pedro Almodóvar, La mala educación (Bad Education) Honorary Nastro: Mario Monicelli, Suso Cecchi D’Amico Guglielmo Biraghi Award: not awarded 2006 Director of Best Italian Film: Michele Placido, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) Best Emerging Director: Francesco Munzi, Saimir Best Producer: Marco Chimenz, Riccardo Tozzi, and Giovanni Stabilini, for La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell), dir. Cristina Comencini; Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana; and Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Katia Ricciarelli, La seconda notte di nozze (The Second Wedding Night), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actor in a Leading Role: Pierfrancesco Favino, Claudio Santamaria, Kim Rossi Stuart, Romanzo criminale (Crime Novel) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Angela Finocchiaro, La bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Carlo Verdone, Manuale d’amore (The Manual of Love), dir. Giovanni Veronesi

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Best Female Dubbing: Alessandra Korompay, voice of Juliette Binoche in Caché, dir. Michael Haneke Best Male Dubbing: Adalberto Maria Merli, voice of Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby Best Screenplay: Ugo Chiti, Giovanni Veronesi, Manuale d’amore (The Manual of Love) Best Cinematography: Fabio Cianchetti, Le bestia nel cuore (Don’t Tell) Best Musical Score: Fabio Barovero, Simone Fabbroni, Negramaro, Roy Paci, Louis Siciliano, La febbre (Fever), dir. Alessandro D’Alatri Best Song: Negramaro, La febbre (Fever) Best Short Film Director: Francesco Costabile, Dentro Roma (Inside Rome) Best Short Film: Emiliano Corapi, Marta con la A (Martha with an A) Special Mention Short Film: Pippo Mezzapesa, Come a Cassano (Like in Cassano); Stefano Rulli, Un silenzio particolase (A Particular Silence) Best Documentary: Sabina Guzzanti, Viva Zapatero! European Nastro: Barbara Bobulova Director of Best Foreign Film: Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby Special Nastro: Dante Ferretti, The Aviator, for production design; Gabriella Pescucci, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for costume design; Nicola Piovani, La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow), for musical score; Pietro Scalia, Memoirs of a Geisha, for editing Honorary Nastro: Stefania Sandrelli Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Valeria Solarino, Riccardo Scamarcio 2007 Director of Best Italian Film: Giuseppe Tornatore, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) Best Emerging Director: Kim Rossi Stuart, Anche libero va bene (Libero: Along the Ridge) Best Producer: Nanni Moretti and Angelo Barbagallo, Il caimano (The Caiman), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Actress in a Leading Role: Margherita Buy, Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek; Il caimano (The Caiman) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Silvio Orlando, Il caimano (The Caiman) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Ambra Angiolini, Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alessandro Haber, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman); Le rose nel deserto (The Roses of the Desert), dir. Mario Monicelli Best Dubbing: Adriano Giannini, voice of Raz Degan in Centochiodi, dir. Ermanno Olmi

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Best Screenplay: Ferzan Ozpetek, Gianni Romoli, Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition) Best Cinematography: Maurizio Calvesi, Viaggio segreto (Secret Journey), dir. Roberto Andò Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman) Best Song: Neffa, Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition) Best Documentary: Marco Amenta, Il fantasma di Corleone (The Ghost of Corleone) Director of Best European Film: Pedro Almodóvar, Volver (To Return) Director of Best Non-European Film: Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima European Nastro: Martina Gedeck; Sergio Castellito, for Masterclass in Cannes Special Nastro: Fausto Brizzi, Michele Placido, Gabriele Muccino Honorary Nastro: Dino Risi Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Elio Germano, Cristiana Capotondi, Nicolas Vaporidis 2008 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Virzì, Tutta la vita davanti (A Whole Life Ahead) Best Emerging Director: Andrea Molaioli, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci and Fandango, Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos), dir. Antonello Grimaldi Best Actress in a Leading Role: Margherita Buy, Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds), dir. Silvio Soldini Best Actor in a Leading Role: Toni Servillo, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sabrina Ferilli, Tutta la vita davanti (A Whole Life Ahead) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alessandro Gassman, Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos) Best Screenplay: Sandro Petraglia, La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) Best Cinematography: Arnaldo Catinari, I demoni di San Pietroburgo (The Demons of St. Petersburg), dir. Giuliano Montaldo; Parlami d’amore (Talk to Me about Love), dir. Silvio Muccino Best Musical Score: Paolo Buonvino, Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos) Best Song: Ivano Fossati, Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos)

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Best Documentary: Esmeralda Calabria, Giuseppe Ruggiero, Andrea D’Ambrosio, Biùtiful cauntri Director Best European Film: Sam Garbaski, Irina Palm Director of Best Non-European Film: Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead Director of Best Short Film: Michele Alhaique, Il torneo (The Tournament) Special Mention Director of Best Short Film: Fabio Mollo, Giganti (Giants) Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Andrea Miglio Risi, Luca Argentero, Valentina Lodovini, Isabella Ragonese European Nastro: Kasia Smutniak, Antonia Liskova Honorary Nastro: Carlo Lizzani, Piero De Bernardi, Vittorio Storaro Nasto of the Year: Aurelio De Laurentiis; Luigi De Laurentiis Jr.; Claudia Gerini; Carlo Verdone, for Grande, grosso e . . . Verdone (Big, Big and . . . Verdone) 2009 Introduction of Nastro for Best Italian Comedy of the Year and the Nino Manfredi Prize. Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Sorrentino, Il divo Best Emerging Director: Gianni Di Gregorio, Pranzo di ferragosto (MidSummer Lunch) Best Producer: Francesca Cima, Nicola Giuliano, Andrea Occhipinti, Maurizio Coppolecchia, Fabio Converso, Il divo Best Actress in a Leading Role: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Vincere, dir. Marco Bellocchio Best Actor in a Leading Role: Toni Servillo, Il divo Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Francesca Neri, Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father), dir. Pupi Avati Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ezio Greggio, Il papà di Giovanna (Giovanna’s Father) Best Dubbing: Adriano Giannini, voice of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, dir. Christopher Nolan Best Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino, Il divo Best Cinematography: Daniele Ciprì, Vincere Best Musical Score: Paolo Buonvino, Italians Best Song: Baustelle, Valeria Golino, Giulia non esce la sera (Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night), dir. Giuseppe Piccioni Best Documentary: Gustav Hofer, Luca Ragazzi, Improvvisamente l’inverno scorso (Suddenly Last Winter)

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Best Comedy: Ex, dir. Fausto Brizzi Director Best European Film: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire Director Best Non-European Film: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino Special Mention Short Film: Paolo Sassanelli (actor), La preda (The Prey), dir. Francesco Apice; Paolo Sassanelli (director), Uerra (War); Nico Cirasola (actor/director), Focaccia Blues European Nastro: Isabelle Huppert 20th Anniversary European Nastro: Andrzej Wajda Nastro of the Year: Roberto Saviano, Matteo Garrone, Domenico Procacci, Gomorra (Gomorrah), dir. Matteo Garrone Special Nastro: Piera Degli Esposti, Raoul Bova Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Laura Chiatti Nino Manfredi Award: Beppe Fiorello 2010 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Virzì, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing) Best Emerging Director: Valerio Mieli, Dieci inverni (Ten Winters); Rocco Papaleo, Basilicata Coast to Coast Best Producer: Simone Bachini, Giorgio Diritti, L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Micaela Ramazotti, Stefania Sandrelli, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing) Best Actor in a Leading Role: Christian De Sica, Il figlio più piccolo (The Youngest Son), dir. Pupi Avati; Elio Germano, La nostra vita (Our Life), dir. Daniele Luchetti Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Isabella Ragonese, Due vite per caso (One Life, Maybe Two), dir. Alessandro Aronadio; Lunetta Savino, Elena Sofia Ricci, Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Ennio Fantastichini, Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons); Luca Zingaretti, Il figlio più piccolo (The Youngest Son) Best Screenplay: Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo, Paolo Virzì, La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing) Best Cinematography: Maurizio Calvesi, Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) Best Musical Score: Rita Marcotulli, Basilicata Coast to Coast Best Song: Marco Giacomelli, Patty Pravo, Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) Best Documentary: Pietro Marcello, La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf) Best Documentary about Cinema: Marco Spagnoli, Hollywood sul Tevere (Hollywood on the Tiber)

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Best Comedy: Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) Director Best European Film: Radu Mihaileanu, Le concert (The Concert) Director Best Non-European Film: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds Director Best 3-D Film: James Cameron, Avatar Director Best Short Film: Adriano Giannini, Il gioco (The Game) Director Best Short Animated Film: Susanna Nicchiarelli, Sputnik 5 Best Short Film: César Meneghetti, Elisabetta Pandimiglio, Mille giorni di Vito (Vito’s Thousand Days) Special Mention Best Short Film: Pippo Mezzapesa, L’altra metà (The Other Half); Massimiliano Camaiti (writer and director), Filippo Bologna (writer), Michele D’Attanasio (cinematographer), L’ape e il vento (The Bee And the Wind); Filippo Soldi (director), Claudio Santamaria (actor), Alba Rohrwacher (actress), Mio figlio (My Son); Andrea Caligari, Marco Giallini (actors), La pagella (The Report Card), dir. Alessandro Celli Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Michele Riondino European Nastro: Tilda Swinton, Vincent Linden Special Nastro: Michele Frammartino, Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel, Nicola Nocella Honorary Nastro: Armando Trovajoli, Ilaria Occhini, Ugo Gregoretti Nastro of the Year: Giuseppe Tornatore, Francesco Scianna, Margareth Madè, Maurizio Sabatini, Massimo Quaglia, Ennio Morricone, Enrico Lucidi, for Baarìa 2011 Director of Best Italian Film: Nanni Moretti, Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope) Best Emerging Director: Alice Rohrwacher, Corpo celeste Best Producer: Nanni Moretti, Domenico Procacci, Habemus Papam Best Actress in a Leading Role: Alba Rohrwacher, La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), dir. Saverio Costanzo Best Actor in a Leading Role: Kim Rossi Stuart, Valanzasca—Gli angeli del male (Angel of Evil), dir. Michele Placido Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Carolina Crescentini, 20 sigarette (20 Cigarettes), dir. Aureliano Amadei; Boris, il film (Boris, a Film), dir. Giacomo Ciarrapico, Mattia Torre Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Giuseppe Battiston, for La passione (The Passion), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati; Figli delle stelle (Unlikely Revolutionaries), dir. Lucio Pellegrini; and Senza arte né parte (Make a Fake), dir. Giovanni Albanese

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Best Screenplay: Massimo Gaudioso, Benvenuti al sud (Welcome to the South), dir. Luca Miniero Best Cinematography: Alessandro Pesci, Habemus Papam Best Musical Score: Negramaro, Vallanzasca—Gli angeli del male (Angel of Evil) Best Song: Alessio Bonomo, Francesco Cerasi, Emilio Solfrizzi, Se sei così ti dico sì (If That’s How You Are I’ll Say Yes), dir. Eugenio Cappuccio Best Documentary: Gabriele Salvatores, 1960 Best Documentary about Cinema: Gianfranco Giagni, Dante Ferretti: Scenografo italiano (Dante Ferretti: Italian Production Designer) Best Comedy: Nessuno mi può giudicare (Escort in Love), dir. Massimiliano Bruno Director Best European Film: Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech Director Best Non-European Film: Clint Eastwood, Hereafter Director Best Short Film: Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, Diarchia (Diarchy) Best Emerging Director Short Film: Valeria Golino, Armandino e il Madre Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Vinicio Marchioni, Francesco Di Leva, Chiara Francini, Sarah Felberbaum, Francesco Montanari European Nastro: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Michel Piccoli Special Nastro: Pupi Avati, Una sconfinata giovinezza (A Second Childhood) Nastro of the Year: Luigi Lo Cascio, Valerio Binasco, Francesca Inaudi, Luigi Pisani, Edoardo Natoli, Andrea Bosca, Guido Caprino, Renato Carpentieri, Michele Riondino, Peppino Mazzotta, Franco Ravera, Stefano Cassetti, Andrea Renzi, Ivan Franek, Mario Martone, Giorgio Magliulo, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Concita Airoldi, Carlo Degli Esposti, Roberto De Francesco,Toni Servillo, Luca Barbareschi, Fiona Shaw, Luca Zingaretti, Anna Bonaiuto, ensemble cast of Noi credevamo (We Believed), dir. Mario Martone 2012 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Sorrentino, This Must Be the Place Best Emerging Director: Francesco Bruni, Scialla! Stai sereno (Easy!) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, Diaz, Don’t Clean up This Blood, dir. Daniele Vicari Best Actress in a Leading Role: Micaela Ramazotti, Posti in piedi in paradiso (A Flat for Three), dir. Carlo Verdone; Il cuore grande delle ragazze (The Big Heart of Girls), dir. Pupi Avati

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Best Actor in a Leading Role: Pierfrancesco Favino, ACAB—All Cops Are Bastards, dir. Sergio Sollima; Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy), dir. Marco Tullio Giordana Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Michela Cescon, Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Marco Giallini, ACAB; Marco Giallini, Posti in piedi in paradiso (A Flat for Three) Best Screenplay: Marco Tullio Giordana, Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia, Romanzo di una strage (Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, This Must Be the Place Best Musical Score: Franco Piersanti, Terraferma, dir. Emanuele Crialese; Le premier homme (The First Man), dir. Gianni Amelio Best Song: Andrea Guerra, Elisa, Michele Von Büren, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, dir. Roberto Faenza Best Documentary: Black Block, dir. Carlo A. Bachschmidt Special Mention Best Documentary: Hit the Road, Nonna, dir. Duccio Chiarini; Hollywood Invasion, Giovanna Cau—Diversamente giovane, dir. Marco Spagnoli Best Comedy: Posti in piedi in paradiso (A Flat for Three) Director Best European Film: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist Director Best Non-European Film: Nicholas Winding Refn, Drive Director Best Short Film: Enrico Maria Artale, Il respiro dell’arco (My Bow Breathing) Special Mention Short Film: A Chjàna, dir. Jonas Carpignano; Fireworks, dir. Giacomo Abbruzzese; Sotto casa (Under the House), dir. Alessio Laura Best Emerging Director Short Film: Maria Grazia Cuccinotta, Il maestro (The Teacher) Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Andrea Bosca, Andrea Osvárt Guglielmo Biraghi Award Special Mention: Filippo Scicchitano, Filippo Pucillo European Nastro: Matteo Garrone, for his international success Special Nastro: Maurizio Cartolano, Giovanna Cau, Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo, Filiberto Scarpelli Honorary Nastro: Anna Proclemer Nastro of the Year: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Grazia Volpi, Roberto Perpignani, Cosimo Rega, Salvatore Striano, Giovanni Arcuri, Antonio Frasca, Juan Dario Bonetti, Vincenzo Gallo, Rosario Majorana, Francesco De Masi, Gennaro Solito, Vittorio Parrella, Pasquale Crapetti, Francesco Carusone, Fabio Rizzuto, Fabio Cavalli, Maurilio Giaffreda, cast of Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

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2013 Director of Best Italian Film: Giuseppe Tornatore, La migliore offerta (The Best Offer) Best Emerging Director: Valeria Golino, Miele (Honey) Best Producer: Isabella Cocuzza, Arturo Paglia, La migliore offerta (The Best Offer) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Jasmine Trinca, Miele (Honey); Un giorno devi andare (There Will Come a Day), dir. Giorgio Diritti Best Actor in a Leading Role: Aniello Arena, Reality, dir. Matteo Garrone Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sabrina Ferilli, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty), dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Carlo Verdone, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) Best Screenplay: Roberto Andò, Angelo Pasquini, Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, for L’intervallo (The Interval), dir. Leonardo Di Costanzo; La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty); and Un giorno speciale (A Special Day), dir. Francesca Comencini Best Musical Score: Ennio Morricone, La migliore offerta (The Best Offer) Best Song: Cesare Cremonin, Gianni Morandi, Padroni di casa (The Landlords), dir. Edoardo Gabriellini Best Documentary: Terramatta, dir. Costanza Quatriglio Best Documentary about Cinema: Giuseppe Tornatore: Ogni film un’ opera prima (Giuseppe Tornatore: Every Film Is the First), dir. Luciano Barcaroli, Gerardo Panich Best Comedy: Viaggio sola (A Five Star Life), dir. Maria Sole Tognazzi Best Short Film Director: Gabriele Mainetti, Tiger Boy Best Short Film: Il turno di notte lo fanno le stelle (The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars), dir. Edoardo Ponti Special Mention Short Film: La casa di Ester (Ester’s House), dir. Stefano Chiodini; La legge di Jennifer, dir. Tommaso Arrighi European Nastro: Tea Falco, Io e te (Me and You), dir. Bernardo Bertolucci Nastro of the Year: Bernardo Bertolucci, Umberto Contarello, Francesca Marciano, Niccolo Ammaniti, Jacopo Quadri, Fabio Cianchetti, Franco Piersanti, cast of Io e te (Me and You) Extraordinary Nastro for the Year: Tony Servillo, for his performances in Bella addormentata (Dormant Beauty), dir. Marco Bellocchio; La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty); and Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom)

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Special Nastro: Roberto Herlitzka, for entire career; Sergio Castellito; Margaret Mazzantini Gold Nastro: Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo for Hugo, dir. Martin Scorsese Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Filippo Scicchitano, Rosabell Laurenti Sellers Guglielmo Biraghi Special Mention: Giulia Valentini, Jacopo Olmo Antinori Special Mention: Giuliano Montaldo, for his performance in Giuliano Montaldo: Quattro volte vent’anni (Four Times Twenty Years), dir. Marco Spagnoli Nasto Bulgari: Tea Falco Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Alessandro Gassman, Razza bastarda (The Mongrel) 2014 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Virzì, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Emerging Director: Pierfrancesco Diliberto, La mafia uccide solo d’estate (The Mafia Kills Only in Summer) Best Producer: Domenico Procacci, Matteo Rovere, Smetto quando voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want), dir. Sydney Sibilia Best Actress in a Leading Role: Kasia Smutniak, Allacciate le cinture (Fasten Your Seat Belts), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Actor in a Leading Role: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Fabrizio Gifuni, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Paola Minaccioni, Allacciate le cinture (Fasten Your Seat Belts) Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Carlo Buccirosso, Paolo Sassanelli, Song’e Napule (Song of Napoli), dir. Manetti Bros Best Screenplay: Paolo Virzì, Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo, Il capitale umano (Human Capital) Best Cinematography: Daniele Ciprì, Salvo, dir. Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza Best Musical Score: Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Song’e Napule (Song of Napoli) Best Song: Giampaolo Morelli, Flavio D’Ancona, Song’e Napule (Song of Napoli) Special Jury Prize for Documentary: Sacro GRA, dir. Gianfranco Rosi Best Documentary: Per altri occhi (Other Eyes), dir. Silvio Soldini and Giorgio Garini Best Documentary about Cinema: I tarantiniani (The Tarantinians), dir. Steve Della Casa, Maurizio Tedesco

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Special Mention Documentary: Lino Micciché, mio padre—una visione del mondo (Lino Micciché, My Father—a Vision of the World), dir. Francesco Miccichè; Lettera al Presidente, dir. Marco Santarelli; Bertolucci on Bertolucci, dir. Walter Fasanano, Luca Guadagnino; Dal profondo (From the Depths), dir. Valentina Pedicini Special Nastro Best Actress in a Documentary: Piera Degli Esposti, Tutte le storie di Piera (All the Stories of Piera), dir. Peter Marcias Best Comedy: Song’e Napule (Song of Napoli), dir. Manetti Bros Best Short Film: Settanta (Seventy), dir. Pippo Mezzapesa Director Best Emerging Short Film: Stefano Accorsi, Io non ti conosco (I Don’t Know You) Special Nastro: Francesco Rosi, for his career; Piero Tosi, for his career; Marina Cicogna, for her career; Ettore Scola, Luciano Ricceri, Luciano Tovoli, Andrea Guerra, for Che Strano chiamarsi Federico (How Strange to be Called Federico), dir. Ettore Scola; Alice Rohrwacher, Le meraviglie (The Wonders) Honorary Nastro: Franco Zeffirelli, Giovanna Melandri Nastro of the Year: La sedia della felicità (The Chair of Happiness), dir. Carlo Mazzacurati (posthumously) Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Sara Serraiocco, Matilde Gioli, Eugenio Franceschini, Lorenzo Richelmy Guglielmo Biraghi Special Mention: Maria Alexandra Lungu, Giulia Salerno Nasto Bulgari: Asia Argento Nino Manfredi Award: Marco Giallini, Edoardo Leo, Claudio Amendola Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Pierfrancesco Diliberto, La mafia uccide solo d’ estate (The Mafia Kills Only in Summer) 2015 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Sorrentino, Youth—la giovinezza (Youth) Best Emerging Director: Edoardo Maria Falcone, Se Dio vuole (God Willing) Best Producer: Luigi and Olivia Musini, Anime nere (Black Souls), dir. Francesco Munzi Best Actress in a Leading Role: Margherita Buy, Mia madre (My Mother), dir. Nanni Moretti Best Actor in a Leading Role: Alessandro Gassman, Il nome del figlio (An Italian Name), dir. Francesca Archibugi; I nostri ragazzi (The Dinner), dir. Ivano De Matteo Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Micaela Ramazotti, Il nome del figlio (An Italian Name)

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Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Claudio Amendola, Noi e la Giulia (The Legendary Giulia and Other Miracles), dir. Edoardo Leo Best Screenplay: Francesco Munzi, Fabrizio Ruggirello, Maurizio Braucci, Gioacchino Criaco, Anime nere (Black Souls) Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, Youth—la giovinezza (Youth) Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, Hungry Hearts, dir. Saverio Costanzo Best Song: Francesco De Gregori, Sei mai stato sulla luna? (Ever Been to the Moon?), dir. Paolo Genovese Best Documentary: Triangle, dir. Costanza Quatriglio Best Documentary about Cinema: Gian Luigi Rondi: Vita, cinema, passione (Gian Luigi Rondi: Life, Film, Passion), dir. Giorgio Treves Special Mention Best Documentary: 9x10 novanta (9x10 Ninety) Best Comedy: Noi e la Giulia (The Legendary Giulia and Other Miracles) Best Short Film: Sonderkommando, dir. Nicola Ragone Best Short Animated Film: L’attesa di Maggio (Waiting for May), dir. Simone Massi Special Mention Short Film: Il sorriso di Candida (Candida’s Smile), dir. Angelo Caruso Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Simona Tabasco, Greta Scarano Guglielmo Biraghi Award Special Mention: Silvia D’Amico, Niccolò Calvagna European Nastro: Laura Morante, Lambert Wilson Special Nastro: Ninetto Davoli, for his career; Douglas Kirkland, for his career; Giulia Lazzarini; Adriana Asti; Cristina Comencini; Fango e Gloria (Mud and Glory), dir. Leonardo Tiberi Nastro of the Year: Elio Germano, Mario Martone, Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi) Nino Manfredi Award: Paola Cortellesi Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Luca Zingaretti, Perez 2016 Director of Best Italian Film: Paolo Virzì, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy) Best Emerging Director: Gabriele Mainetti, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Producer: Pietro Valsecchi, for Quo Vado? (Where Am I Going?), dir. Gennaro Nunziante; Chamatemi Francesco: Il Papa della gente (Call Me Francesco), dir. Daniele Luchetti; and Non essere Cattivo (Don’t Be Bad), dir. Claudio Caligari Best Actress in a Leading Role: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Micaela Ramazotti, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy)

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Best Actor in a Leading Role: Stefano Accorsi, Veloce come il vento (Italian Race), dir. Matteo Rovere Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Greta Scarano, Suburra, dir. Stefano Sollima Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Luca Marinelli, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) Best Screenplay: Paolo Virzì, Francesca Archibugi, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy) Best Cinematography: Maurizio Calvesi, Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad); Maurizio Calvesi, Le Confessioni (The Confessions), dir. Roberto Andò Best Musical Score: Carlo Virzì, La pazza gioia (Like Crazy) Best Song: Bungaro, Cesare Chiodo, Fiorella Mannoia, Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers), dir. Paolo Genovese Best Documentary: The Other Side, dir. Roberto Minervini Best Documentary about Cinema: Alfredo Bini, ospite inatteso (Alfredo Bini, Unexpected Guest), dir. Simona Isola Best Docufilm: Bella e Perduta (Lost and Beautiful), dir. Pietro Marcello Special Mention Best Documentary: Harry’s Bar, dir. Carlotta Cerquetti; Prima di tutto (First of All), dir. Marco S. Puccioni Best Comedy: Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers) Best Short Film: Nel silenzio (In Silence), dir. Lorenzo Ferrante Best Animated Short Film: Panorama, dir. Gianluca Abbate Special Mention Short Film: Il miracolo (The Miracle), dir. Serena Aragona, Honglei Bao, Frabrizio Benvenuto, Luca Cenname, Michele Leonardi, Alberto Mangiapane, Domenico Modaferri, Alain Parroni, Mariagiovanna Postorino, Mario Vitale Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Matilda De Angelis; Leonardo Pazzagli, Rimau Ritzberger Grillo, Valentina Romani, Alessandro Sperduti European Nastro: Juliette Binoche International Nastro: Kevin Costner, for his career Special Nastro: Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), dir. Gianfranco Rosi; Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers), entire cast; L’esercito più piccolo del mondo (World’s Smallest Army), dir. Gianfranco Pannone Golden Nastro: Stefania Sandrelli Nastro of the Year: Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad) Nino Manfredi Award: Carlo Verdone and Antonio Albanese, for L’abbiamo fatta grossa (We’ve Really Done It This Time) Special Prize: Fiore, dir. Claudio Giovannesi Graziella Bonacchi Award: Alessandro Borghi, Non essere cattivo (Don’t Be Bad); Alessandro Borghi, Suburra, dir. Stefano Sollima Special 70th Anniversary Nastro: Massimo Popolizio and Giuseppe Fiorello; Leo Gullotta; Sabrina Ferilli; Marco D’Amore

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Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Gabriele Mainetti, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot (They Call Me Jeeg) 2017 Director of Best Italian Film: Gianni Amelio, La tenerezza (Tenderness) Best Emerging Director: Andrea De Sica, I figli della notte (Children of the Night) Best Producer: Attilio De Razza and Pier Paolo Verga, Indivisibili (Indivisible), dir. Edoardo De Angelis Best Actress in a Leading Role: Jasmine Trinca, Fortunata (Lucky), dir. Sergio Castellito Best Actor in a Leading Role: Renato Carpentieri, La tenerezza (Tenderness) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Sabrina Ferilli, Omicidio all’italiana (Murder Italian Style), dir. Marcello Macchia; Carla Signoris, Lasciati andare (Let Yourself Go), dir. Francesco Amato Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Alessandro Borghi, Fortunata (Lucky); Alessandro Borghi, Il più grande sogno (I Was a Dreamer), dir. Michele Vannucci Best Screenplay: Francesco Bruni, Tutto quello che vuoi (Everything You Want), dir. Francesco Bruni Best Cinematography: Luca Bigazzi, La tenerezza (Tenderness); Luca Bigazzi, A Sicilian Ghost Story, dir. Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza Best Musical Score: Enzo Avitabile, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Song: Enzo Avitabile, Indivisibili (Indivisible) Best Documentary: Porno e libertà (Porn to Be Free), dir. Carmine Amoroso Best Documentary about Cinema: The Young Pope: A Tale of Filmmaking, dir. Franco Mollo Special Mention Best Documentary: Crazy for Football:The Craziest World Cup, dir. Volfango De Biasi; Femminismo!, dir. Paola Columba Best Comedy: L’ora legale (Daylight Saving), dir. Ficarra and Picone Best Short Film: Moby Dick, dir. Nicola Sorcinelli Best Animated Short Film: Life Sucks! But at Least I’ve Got Elbows, dir. Nicola Piovesan Special Prize Short Film: Il silenzio (The Silence), dir. Ali Asgari, Farnoosh Samadi Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Brando Pacitto, Daphne Scoccia, Angela and Marianna Fontana, Ludovico Tersigni Special Mention Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Andrea Carpenzano, Vincenzo Crea

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European Nastro: Monica Bellucci, On the Milky Road, dir. Emir Kusturica Special Nastro: Giuliano Montaldo; Tutto quello che vuoi (Everything You Want), dir. Francesco Bruni; Franca: Chaos and Creation, dir. Francesco carrozzini Honorary Nastro: Roberto Faenza, for his career Nastro of the Year: The Young Pope, dir. Paolo Sorrentino Nino Manfredi Award: Pierfrancesco Favino and Kasia Smutniak, Moglie e marito (Wife and Husband), dir. Simone Godano Special Awards: Il silenzio (The Silence), dir. Ali Asgari (short); 7 Minuti (7 Minutes), dir. Michele Placido; Monte (Mountain), dir. Amir Naderi; Sole, cuore, amore (Sun, Heart, Love), dir. Daniele Vicari Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Gabriele Muccino, L’estate adosso (Summertime) 2018 Director of Best Italian Film: Matteo Garrone, Dogman Best Emerging Director: Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, La terra dell’abbastanza (Boys Cry) Best Producer: Matteo Garrone, Paolo Del Brocco, Dogman Best Actress in a Leading Role: Elena Sofia Ricci, Loro 1, dir. Paolo Sorrentino; Loro 2, dir. Paolo Sorrentino Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Dogman Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Kasia Smutniak, Loro 1; Loro 2 Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Riccardo Scamarcio, Loro 1; Loro 2 Best Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino Umberto Contarello, Loro 1; Loro 2 Best Cinematography: Gian Filippo Corticelli, Napoli velata (Naples in Veils), dir. Ferzan Ozpetek Best Musical Score: Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Ammore e Malavita (Love and Bullets), dir. Manetti Bros Best Song: Serena Rossi, Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, Ammore e Malavita (Love and Bullets) Best Documentary: Mondo Za, dir. Grianfranco Pannone Best Comedy: Come un gatto in tangenziale (Like a Cat on a Highway), dir. Riccardo Milani Best Actor in a Comedy: Antonio Albanese, Come un gatto in tangenziale (Like a Cat on a Highway) Best Actress in a Comedy: Paola Cortellesi, Come un gatto in tangenziale (Like a Cat on a Highway) Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Guglielmo Poggi, Euridice Axen, Andrea Lattanzi

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Special Nastro: For the whole cast of A casa tutti bene (There’s No Place Like Home), dir. Gabriele Muccino; Gatta Cenerentola (Cinderella the Cat), dir. Ivan Cappiello, Marino Guarnieri, Alessandro Rak, Dario Sansone; Vittorio e Paolo Taviani, for Una questione privata (Rainbow: A Private Affair); Marco Tullio Giordana, for Nome di donna (A Woman’s Name) Honorary Nastro: Gigi Proietti, for his entire career; Massimo Ghini, for his first 40 years in films International Nastro: Paolo Virzì, for Ella e John (The Leisure Seeker); Vittorio Storaro, for Wonder Wheel, dir. Woody Allen Nastro of Legality: Daniele Vicari, Prima che la notte (Before Night); Bruno Oliviero, Nato a Casal Di Principe (Born at Casal di Principe) Nastro Argentovivo: Gabriele Salvatores, Il ragazzo invisibile—seconda generazione (The Invisible Boy—Second Generation) Nino Manfredi Award: Claudia Gerini Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Luciano Ligabue, Made in Italy 2019 Best Director: Marco Bellocchio, Il traditore (The Traitor) Best Emerging Director: Leonardo D’Agostini, Il campione (The Champion); Valerio Mastrandrea, Ride (Laughing) Best Film: Il traditore (The Traitor) Best Producer: Goenlandia Group, Il primo re (Romulus and Remus: The First King), dir. Matteo Rovere; Il campione (The Champion) Best Actress in a Leading Role: Anna Foglietta, Un giorno all’improvviso (If Life Gives You Lemons), dir. Ciro D’Emilio Best Actor in a Leading Role: Pierfrancesco Favino, Il traditore (The Traitor) Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Marina Confalone, Il vizio della speranza (The Vice of Hope), dir. Edoardo De Angelis Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Luigi Lo Cascio, Fabrizio Ferracane, Il traditore (The Traitor) Best Actress in a Comedy: Paola Cortellesi, Ma cosa ci dice il cervello (Don't Stop Me Now), dir. Riccardo Milani Best Actor in a Comedy: Stefano Fresi, for C’é tempo (There’s Time), dir. Walter Veltroni; Ma cosa ci dice il cervello (Don't Stop Me Now); and L’uomo che comprò la luna (The Man Who Bought the Moon), dir. Paolo Zucca Best Screenplay: Marco Bellocchio, Ludovica Rampoldi, Valia Santella, Francesco Piccolo, Francesco La Licata, Il traditore (The Traitor)

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Best Cinematography: Daniele Ciprì, Il primo re (Romulus and Remus: The First King); La paranza dei bambini (Piranhas), dir. Claudio Giovannesi Best Musical Score: Nicola Piovani, Il traditore (The Traitor) Best Song: Enzo Avitabile, Il vizio della speranza (The Vice of Hope) Best Documentary: 1938 Diversi (1938 Different), dir. Giorgio Treves Best Documentary about Cinema: “Sono Gassman!” Vittorio re della commedia (“I’m Gassman!” Vittorio King of Comedy), dir. Fabrizio Corallo; Friedkin Uncut, dir. Francesco Zippel Special Mention Best Documentary: 1938—quando scoprimmo di non essere piu italiani (When We Discovered We Were No Longer Italians), dir. Pietro Suber; Be Kind, dir. Sabrina Paravicini and Nino Monteleone; Conversazioni atomiche (Atomic Conversations), dir. Felice Farina; Ho rubata la marmellata: Vita di un artista politicamente scorretto (I Stole the Jam: The Life of a Politically Incorrect Artist), dir. Gioia Magrini, Roberto Meddi; Questo è mio fratello (This Is My Brother), dir. Marco Leopardi Best Comedy: Bangla, dir. Phaim Bhuiyan Best Short Film: Moths to Flame, dir. Luca Jankovic, Marco Pellegrino Best Animated Short Film: Sugarlove, dir. Laura Luchetti Special Prize Short Film: Via Lattea (Milky Way), dir. Valerio Rufo Nuovo Imaie Prize for Dubbing: Angelo Maggi, Simone Mori, Stan & Ollie, dir. John S. Baird Guglielmo Biraghi Award: Chiara Marcheggiani, Ride (Laughing); Pietro Castellito, La profezia dell’armadillo (The Prophecy of the Armadillo), dir. Emanuele Scaringi; Giampiero de Concilio, Un giorno all’improvviso, dir. Ciro D’Emilio; Benedetta Porcaroli, Tutte le mie notti (All My Nights), dir. Manfredi Lucibello Nasto of the Year: To the producers, cast, and crew of Sulla mia pelle (On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi), dir. Alessio Cremonini; Nanni Moretti, Santiago, Italia European Nastro: Luca Guadagnino Special Nastro: Silvano Agosti, for his career; Domenico Procacci, for Fandango’s 30 years; Serena Rossi, for her performance in Io sono Mia (I Am Mia), dir. Roccardo Donna; NOEMI, for performance of song “Domani è un altro giorno” on soundtrack of film Domani è un altro giorno, dir. Simone Spada; Andrea Camilleri, Conversazioni su Tiresia, dir. Roberto Andò Nastro of Legality: Costanza Quatriglio, Sembra mio figlio (Seems Like My Son); Claudio Bonivento, A mano disarmata (Disarmed) Nino Manfredi Award: Stefano Fresi Hamilton behind the Camera Award: Stefano Sollima, Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Bibliography

CONTENTS Introduction General Overviews Dictionaries, Companions, and Bibliographies Silent Cinema Sound Cinema Fascism War and the Resistance Neorealism 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The New Millennium Social and Cultural Themes General Censorship Literature Mafia Migration/Immigration Politics Television Women Genres Cinepanettone Comedy Documentary Giallo Horror Mondo Peplum Poliziesco Western Directors 649

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Antonioni, Michelangelo Bertolucci, Bernardo Blasetti, Alessandro De Sica, Vittorio Fellini, Federico Garrone, Matteo Leone, Sergio Moretti, Nanni Pasolini, Pier Paolo Risi, Dino Rosi, Francesco Rossellini, Roberto Scola, Ettore Sorrentino, Paolo Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio Visconti, Luchino Wertmü ller, Lina The Industry Websites

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INTRODUCTION So much has been, and continues to be, published on all aspects of Italian cinema that it would be impossible to offer anything like an exhaustive bibliography here. What follow are a number of selected bibliographies chosen with the aim of indicating a first port of call for the reader who may want to explore further any of the films, directors, genres, topics, or issues encountered in the dictionary. Inevitably, much of the material listed here is in Italian, but with an aim to serving the interests of the non-Italian reader, relevant works in English have been included wherever possible. As one might expect, there exist a large number of excellent historical overviews of the Italian cinema in Italian, ranging from the more concise pocketbook treatments of Paolo Russo’s Breve storia del cinema italiano to the extremely comprehensive and lavishly illustrated La città del cinema, produced under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Department to celebrate the centennial of cinema in Italy. Undoubtedly the most authoritative and comprehensive mapping of the Italian cinema in Italian has been carried out by Gian Piero Brunetta in the myriad histories he has published since the 1980s, which he has more recently synthesized for a more popular audience in his one-volume Guida alla storia del cinema italiano 1905–2003. Conveniently, for an English-language readership, this accessible summa of Brunet-

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ta’s decades of meticulous and wide-ranging historical scholarship is now available in translation as The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. An even more thorough and detailed coverage of all aspects of the Italian cinema is available to Italian speakers in the monumental multivolume Storia del cinema italiano produced by a team of the most eminent Italian film scholars under the auspices of the National Film School. For the English reader, however, one of the best general and most accessible overviews of the Italian cinema in the postwar period continues to be Peter Bondanella’s originally groundbreaking Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, revised and updated in its third edition. Overlapping somewhat but providing significant new insights is his A History of Italian Cinema, issued a decade ago but more recently revised, augmented, and updated (with Federico Pacchioni) in its second edition. Bringing together a score of other English-language Italian film scholars, Bondanella’s edited anthology, The Italian Cinema Book, also manages to provide a comprehensive overview of Italian cinema, both historically and thematically. Similarly comprehensive, and successful in bringing together the research of many of the most illustrious scholars in the field, is Frank Burke’s monumental A Companion to Italian Cinema, which includes, among its many merits, an insightful forum among the scholars themselves, on the future prospects for Italian cinema and Italian film studies. Despite being slightly marred by a small number of factual inaccuracies, Pierre Sorlin’s Italian National Cinema 1896–1996 is still valuable as a sociologically based account of the first century of cinema in Italy, organized as an examination of five generations of filmmaking and filmgoing. Angela Dalle Vacche’s The Body in the Mirror and Marcia Landy’s Italian Film remain two extremely stimulating and theoretically sophisticated attempts to draw together strands of Italian cinema using a thematic rather than chronological approach, with both also succeeding in providing overarching views of Italian filmmaking. Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones’s A New Guide to Italian Cinema, perhaps now appearing less new in its largely historical and didactic approach, nevertheless still provides a very solid and informative manual furnished with a number of useful appendices, including a full list of all the top 10 grossing films in Italy from 1945 to 2005. On the other hand, Mary P. Wood’s Italian Cinema adopts a more multifaceted thematic approach to explore and exemplify what she rightly calls “the richness of an incredibly productive national cinema,” ranging widely from a consideration of popular cinema and successes at the box office to discussions of cinematic space and visual style. Embracing a different strategy, the volume edited by Giorgio Bertellini, The Cinema of Italy, attempts to present an overview of the Italian cinema in its first century via specially commissioned essays on 24 historically significant films, ranging from Mario Camerini’s 1932 classic Gli Uomini che mascalzoni (Men, What Rascals!) to Gianni Amelio’s La-

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merica (1994). A slightly different but comparable approach is embraced by Louis Bayman in his more recent edited volume on Italy for Intellect’s series “Directory of World Cinema,” which begins with a number of short essays on several important films and events of 2011 and then proceeds to provide something of a history of the major Italian genres via short but pithy essays on the key films. An engaging personal overview of Italian cinema, limited in large part to films and directors of the Neorealist current in the immediate postwar period but helpfully including long excerpts from the films themselves, is also provided by Italian American director Martin Scorsese, with his My Voyage to Italy. Still available on DVD, it is particularly suitable for anyone just beginning to explore the richness of the Italian cinema. Italian readers with a general interest in the cinema are also well served by a number of excellent encyclopedic reference works, the most comprehensive being the multivolume Dizionario del cinema italiano published by Gremese and edited by a variety of authors including Roberto Chiti, Roberto Pappi, and Enrico Lancia. Few similar quick and reliable reference works exist in English, but the British Film Institute Companion to Italian Cinema remains useful in this regard, although now limited somewhat by its date of publication. For much of the postwar period, with the exception of the pioneering works of Maria Adriana Prolo and Roberto Paolella, Italian silent cinema remained something of an unknown continent. From the early 1980s onward, however, there developed a growing amount of both interest and research in the cinema of the silent period, much of it generated by, and revolving around, the now legendary Le giornate del cinema muto held at Pordenone. Unfortunately, very little of the voluminous and groundbreaking research that has been done by Aldo Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli, the two foremost scholars in the area, has made it into English. However, thanks to an issue of the journal Film History in 2000 that was partly dedicated to Italian silent cinema, there emerged brief but informative accounts in English of at least four of the major Italian film studios of the early silent period (see the articles by Silvio Alovisio, Raffaele De Berti, Claudia Gianetto, and Kimberly Tomadjoglou). Aldo Bernardini’s analysis of the recession in the Italian film industry in 1908–1909, published in the same journal a decade earlier, had already provided a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the Italian studios during those very early days of film production. Particularly welcome more recently have been Riccardo Redi’s La Cines: Storia di una casa di produzione italiana, a meticulously researched full-length study of the frontrunner and the longest lived of the Italian silent film production companies, and for English readers in particular, Giorgio Bertellini’s monumental Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, which now provides a comprehensive coverage of Italian silent cinema of which previously one could only dream.

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The question of whether and to what extent the cinema itself became Fascist during the years of the regime has continued to be moot. The critical, if not commercial, triumph of Neorealism in the period immediately following the war prompted a general and wholesale denigration by many Italian film historians of the films produced during the Fascist period, which, largely without being seen, came to be summarily dismissed as either propagandistic and party political, or mindlessly evasive “white telephone” films, in any case undeserving of attention. In 1975, however, following a historic retrospective and a major conference on Neorealism held at Pesaro the previous year, the Mostra del Nuovo Cinema Internazionale also held a retrospective of Italian cinema before Neorealism, featuring films made between 1929 and 1943. The screenings and the large-scale conference that followed, the proceedings of which were published as Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, edited by Riccardo Redi, initiated a profound rethinking and reexamination of what were discovered to be the quite complex and sometimes contradictory relations between Fascism and the cinema that had been produced under the regime. A synthetic review of all this rethinking was presented by Vito Zagarrio in his Cinema e fascismo: Film, modelli, immaginari, which provides not only a historical and theoretical reflection on the question but also informative interviews with a large number of writers, actors, and directors who worked in the Italian film industry during the interwar period, among them hallowed figures such as Cesare Zavattini, Luigi Comencini, and Giuseppe De Santis. Written two decades earlier but still valuable in any attempt to fully understand the Italian cinema under Fascism is Jean A. Gili’s Stato fascista e cinematografia: Repressione e promozione. In English, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith supplied a brief but illuminating account in his article “The Italian Cinema under Fascism,” while James Hay and Marcia Landy closely studied many of the films of the period in context in their Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy and Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943, respectively. Both Hay and Landy also contributed further perceptive analyses to the excellent and wide-ranging anthology Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema 1922–1943, edited by Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo. An informative and engrossing firsthand account of the cinema under Fascism was provided by the person most responsible for it from 1934 to 1943, Luigi Freddi, in his Il cinema (1949, but republished under the auspices of the National Film School in 1994 as Il cinema: Il governo dell’immagine), although, regretfully, the work remains untranslated. Also untranslated but an invaluable resource for the Italian reader is the collection of personal and professional reminiscences of those who worked in the film industry between 1930 and 1943, collected by Francesco Savio and edited by Tullio Kezich in the three-volume Cinecittà anni trenta: Parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano.

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The Resistance to Fascism featured frequently as a theme in many films of the immediate postwar period, especially those styled as Neorealist, but disappeared almost completely from sight during the 1950s, due largely to the ostracism of successive center-right governments. The reasons for this hostility and the problematic nature of the Resistance as a theme, in the cinema and in the media generally during this period, are discussed by Philip Cooke in his article “The Italian State and the Resistance Legacy in the 1950s and 1960s.” The Resistance reappeared on Italian screens during the early 1960s and in successive stages thereafter. In 1970, a major conference on the Resistance in postwar cinema was held under the auspices of the Venice Biennale with the proceedings being published in full as Atti del convegno di studi sulla Resistenza nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra, edited by Camillo Bassotto. A more systematic attempt at listing and commenting on all the films in which the Resistance features as setting or major theme was made in 1995 with the publication of La Resistenza nel cinema italiano 1945–1995, edited by Mauro Manciotti and Aldo Viganò. More accessible and better illustrated is the section on the Resistance in the second volume of Gianfranco Casadio’s La guerra al cinema, which divides the films into four separate historical periods with an introduction to each period clarifying their differing presentations of the movement. In English, when the appearance of the Resistance in Italian films has been studied, it has been done largely within the context of an attempt to analyze how cinema deals with historical themes, as in Pierre Sorlin’s “The Italian Resistance in the Second World War” and “The Night of the Shooting Stars: Fascism, Resistance and the Liberation of Italy.” Neorealism is, without doubt, the seminal theme—indeed one might say the seminal meme—of Italian postwar cinema and, as film historian, Pierre Leprohon, once observed, has had more written about it than any other film movement in history. Discussions in Italian are legion, but fundamental for understanding the multifaceted nature of the movement and the variety of interpretations of its character and scope are the proceedings of the historic conference held at Pesaro in 1974 and edited by Lino Micciché as Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano. Bert Cardullo’s reasoned bibliography, What Is Neorealism? A Critical English-Language Bibliography of Italian Cinematic Realism, provides a useful tool for navigating the mass of material published in English until the late 1980s. In addition to Bondanella’s already mentioned Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present and Liehm’s Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, both of which contain extended discussions of Neorealism, two of the best introductions to the movement in English remain Roy Armes’s Patterns of Realism and Paul Monaco’s Realism, Italian Style. Among the texts regarded as canonical in any discussion of Neorealism are the many short essays in which André Bazin appraised the movement and defended its films, now ranged under the

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rubric of “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of Liberation” in his What Is Cinema? (volume 2). David Overbey’s anthology Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neorealism provides an excellent selection of primary sources, which includes writings by Rossellini, Zavattini, De Sica, and De Santis, while Christopher Wagstaff’s “The Place of Neorealism in Italian Cinema from 1945 to 1954” concisely but effectively contextualizes the movement within postwar Italian cinema generally. One of the most illuminating works in English on the movement and its subsequent influence on Italian cinema remains Millicent Marcus’s Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. The importance of the movement globally, and its significant influence on other national cinemas, is now well synthesized in the anthology Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar. Vincent F. Rocchio’s Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism, remains an interesting and, in many ways, convincing attempt to read Neorealism in a psychoanalytic key, although Rocchio’s tendency to dismiss the value of all other approaches to the movement is somewhat alienating. At the same time, one should perhaps note, for the sake of completion, that the tendency to automatically assume realism as a yardstick, and Neorealism as the glorious exemplar, in any discussion of subsequent Italian cinema has now been forcefully critiqued by two leading scholars in the field, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, in their “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism.” Reference to it is included here in order to allow readers to make up their own minds. Film censorship was introduced in Italy in 1913. The 20 years of authoritarian rule that soon followed and the continuing influence of the Vatican in Italian social and political life may help explain why film censorship subsequently continued to be a bigger issue in Italy, and for longer, perhaps, than in other comparable countries. While few extended studies exist in English, Mino Argentieri’s La censura nel cinema italiano remains the classic history of film censorship in Italy from its beginnings to the 1970s. Domenico Liggieri’s Mani di forbice: La censura cinematografica in Italia retraces some of Argentieri’s steps but also updates discussion and documentation to the 1990s. Alfredo Baldi’s Schermi proibiti: La censura in Italia 1947–1988 similarly documents film censorship in Italy in the first four decades of the postwar period. More recently Roberto Curti and Alessio Di Rocco have covered the entire postwar period until the present in their two volumes, Visioni proibite: I film vietati dalla censura italiana (1947–1968) and Visioni proibite: I film vietati dalla censura italiana (dal 1969 a oggi). While all these authors tend to suggest a ubiquitous and suffocating censorial presence hovering over all Italian cinema for more than a century, David Forgacs’s countercurrent article “Sex in the Cinema: Regulation and Transgression in

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Italian Films, 1930–1943” suggests that, ironically, there was probably quite a bit more sex and transgression in Italian films during the Fascist period than critics have previously either noticed or been willing to admit. If Italian cinema has often been characterized as largely a cinema of auteurs, it has also from its very beginning been a very literary cinema or, perhaps more precisely, a cinema of literary adaptations. Italian readers have available a remarkably exhaustive catalogue raisonné of a century of film adaptations of Italian literary works in Cristina Bragaglia’s Il piacere del racconto: Narrativa italiana e cinema (1895–1990). A good introduction to the problematics of adaptation and a study of literary adaptation in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti, among others, is presented in Antonio Costa’s Immagine di un’immagine: Cinema e letteratura. An illustrated examination of the multiple successive adaptations of one particular work, the classic Italian 19th-century novel The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, is provided by Vittorio Martinelli and Matilde Tortora in their I promessi sposi nel cinema. After having long touched on Italian cinema’s rapport with literature from its earliest days in previous volumes, Gian Piero Brunetta has most recently produced a comprehensive study of Italian cinema’s century-old dynamic exchanges with Italian literature in his Attrazione Fatale: Letterati italiani e letteratura dalla pagina allo schermo: Una storia culturale. In English, however, one of the best works on Italian film adaptations remains Millicent Marcus’s Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, which offers an illuminating analysis of 10 significant films by five major Italian directors. More recently Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello have been able to offer an even wider range of critical studies of specific cinematic adaptations of Italian literary works in their edited volume, Watching Pages, Reading Pictures: Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy. Still useful is Carlo Testa’s wide-ranging discussion of Italian filmmakers’ adaptations of non-Italian, and more specifically European, literary texts in his Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, 1945–2000 and Masters of Two Arts: Recreation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema. Surprisingly, perhaps, while the Mafia as a social phenomenon had long been studied extensively both in Italy and abroad, the appearance of the Mafia in Italian cinema, in both auteur and genre films, had until the late 1990s received little critical attention in the literature. A systematic attempt to look at films dealing with the Sicilian Mafia was made by Vittorio Albano in his La mafia nel cinema siciliano: Da “In nome della Legge” a “Placido Rizzotto.” In English, analysis had generally been limited to specific films by particular directors. Claudio Mazzolla had offered a close reading of the Neorealist style of Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano while Millicent Marcus had provided a discussion of the parodic portrayal of the Mafia in Roberta Torre’s Tano da morire (1997) in her “Postmodern Pastiche, the Sceneggia-

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ta, and the View of the Mafia from Below in Roberta Torre’s To Die for Tano.” More recently, however, Dana Renga has successfully managed to close the previous gaps in the literature on the Mafia in Italian cinema with her comprehensive volume, Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium. In addition, while Francesca Massaro has been able to uncover the links between the Mafia itself and the film industry in her Cinematografia organizzata: Mafia tra cinema fiction e realtà, Pauline Small has also cast light on the changing aesthetic of more recent Italian Mafia films in her “No Way Out: Set Design in Mafia Films.” The cinematic presentation of the Neapolitan mafia, the camorra, in the long-running Gomorra—la serie, has also now received meticulous critical attention in 12 cutting-edge essays hosted by the Italianist journal. Dana Renga presents an overview of the essays in her introductory article, “Gomorra, la Serie: Beyond Realism.” Given the role that migration has played in the history of modern Italy, emigration has been a frequent theme in Italian cinema, which has also reflected the more recent inversion of the outflow of Italians from Italy by the inflow of non-Italian immigrants into the country. One of the earliest attempts to look at how Italian migration had been portrayed in the cinema was by Gian Piero Brunetta in his early “L’emigrato italiano nel cinema: Un campo aperto di ricerca.” Following his opening up of the field, there have been a considerable number of studies that have inevitably slipped from dealing with the representation of Italian emigration in films to also dealing with the cinematic response to foreign immigration. Among the most comprehensive accounts in Italian are Andrea Corrado and Igor Mariottini’s Cinema e autori sulle tracce delle migrazioni and Massimiliano Coviello’s entry “Emigrazione” in Roberto De Gaetano’s edited anthology, Lessico del cinema Italiano. Most of the literature in English has tended to focus on the massive presence in Italian films of the last two decades of foreign immigrants to Italy, much of which has uncovered an unsuspected hostility to migrants, to the point of racism, in a country that had previously brandished its own history of emigration as a badge of courage. This is explored most forcefully in Grace Russo Bullaro’s edited volume From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema and Vetri Nathan’s Marvelous Bodies: Italy’s New Migrant Cinema. Undoubtedly due to the long shadow cast by Neorealism over subsequent Italian cinema, and its enduring reputation as an expression of opposition to the previous authoritarian regime, postwar Italian cinema has inevitably tended toward the political. An overarching survey of the persistence of a political cinema in the postwar period is provided by Maurizio Fantoni Minella in his Non riconciliati: Politica e società nel cinema italiano dal neorealismo a oggi, while in their Destra e sinistra nel cinema italiano: Film e immaginario politico dagli anni ’60 al nuovo millennio, Christian Uva and

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Michele Picchi uncover a strong political dimension even in many of the popular genre and B-grade films from the 1960s to the 1990s. In English, one of the best overall works in the field remains John J. Michalczyk’s The Italian Political Filmmakers, which closely analyzes and contextualizes the political thrust of the key films of Francesco Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Giulio Pontecorvo, Elio Petri, and Lina Wertmüller. This long and venerated tradition of a politically inflected cinema seemed to many to come to be fatally undermined by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called end of the First Republic, which followed the Mani pulite (Clean Hands) investigations of the early 1990s, to the point where the very possibility of a political cinema was placed in question. That a certain dimension of sociopolitical engagement has continued to appear in the work of many Italian filmmakers of the new millennium, arguably testifying to the birth of a new sort of Italian socially committed cinema, is maintained and examined by the host of scholars contributing to the recently published twovolume anthology Un nuovo cinema politico italiano?, edited by William Hope, Silvana Serra, and Luciana D’Arcangeli. The perceived threat to the cinema posed by television from the mid-1970s onward is palpable in Enza Troianelli’s article “Il cinema, fiore all’occhiello del palinsesto televisivo” and Ansano Giannarelli’s “Cinema e TV: Un nodo da sciogliere,” both from the militant journal Cinemasessanta of that period. However, in the long run, as Luisa Cigognetti and Pierre Sorlin demonstrate in their “Italy—Cinema and Television: Collaborators and Threat,” the relation eventually developed from rivalry to collaboration, and to the mutual advantage of both. That, in fact, despite repeated alarmisms, the relation between them had always been largely supportive, is well documented in Alberto Barbera’s edited anthology, Cavalcarono insieme: 50 anni di cinema e televisione in Italia. At the same time, the advent of long-form television in Italy in the new millennium has stimulated the growth of Italian television studies as an autonomous discipline, which has recently borne some of its most mature fruits in a dozen essays on the first season of the long-running crime series, Gomorra, la serie. As mentioned earlier in the Mafia section, an entry into these fine essays is provided by Mafia specialist Dana Renga, in her “Gomorra la Serie: Beyond Realism.” Although granted the right to vote in 1945 and exercising a greater independence and autonomy than ever before, women continued to occupy an ambivalent and often subaltern position in Italy immediately after the war, at least until the coming of Italian feminism in the early 1970s, and this was strongly reflected in the cinema. Leandra Negro’s “Le donne del secondo dopoguerra nel cinema italiano (1949–1955)” and Anna Maria Caso’s “L’immagine della donna nel cinema del boom economico (1955–1963)” trace the slow evolution of a more modern role for women in the films of this period. Giovanna Grignaffini’s “Il femminile nel cinema italiano: Racconti

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di nascita,” however, convincingly argues that the entire renewal of Italian cinema, and with it Italian society, in the immediate postwar period occurs precisely under the sign of the feminine, a notion similarly explored by Millicent Marcus in “The Italian Body Politic Is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Cinema.” Nevertheless, and despite the definitive changes wrought by feminism in Italy in the 1970s, Giovanni Grazzini’s Eva dopo Eva concludes from its review of almost 150 films made from 1962 to 1980 that in many ways the stereotypes remained. Maria Ossi’s Donne e cinema nell’Europa duemila: Fra immaginario e quotidianità discusses the more varied images of women presented in Italian films in the 1990s and provides a European context for comparison. Tiziano Sassi’s Dizionario delle registe: L’altra metà del cinema attempts to give female Italian directors their due, alongside female directors worldwide. By far one of the most engaging works on the presence of women in the Italian film industry has been Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, which provides not only a much-needed rehabilitation of Elvira Notari, one of the great but largely neglected Italian female directors of the silent period, but also a profound meditation on the nature and function of the cinema in the silent era. The actresses of the silent period have also been definitively celebrated in Vittorio Martinelli’s Le dive del silenzio although, as the groundbreaking scholarship brought together in Monica Dall’Asta’s edited critical anthology, Non solo dive: Pionere del cinema italiano demonstrates, even the divas participated more extensively in and made a much greater contribution to Italian cinema of the silent period than previously acknowledged in standard histories. A good overarching account of women in the Italian cinema from the silent period to the present is now available in Bernadette Luciano and Susanna Scarparo’s “Women in Italian Cinema: From the Age of Silent Cinema to the Third Millennium.” A both comprehensive and detailed account of the representation of women in the Italian cinema is now also available in Margo Cottino-Jones’ Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema. At a more popular level, the lives and careers of more than 80 major female stars of the Italian cinema have been documented in Stefano Masi and Enrico Landa’s very readable and well-illustrated Italian Movie Goddesses: Over 80 of the Greatest Women in Italian Cinema. An admirably wideranging and perceptive study of gender in the Italian cinema has now also been provided by Maggie Günsberg in her Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre. While long devalued by serious critics as an inferior form of cinema, the Italian genres have in fact contributed substantially to both the economic viability of the Italian film industry over the years and to the popularity of Italian cinema throughout the world. While a great deal has now also been written in Italy about the major genres, some of the best works on genres such as Italian horror, the giallo, and the Spaghetti Western have appeared in

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English. Adrian Luther Smith’s Blood and Black Lace is indeed, as it claims, the definitive guide to Italian sex and horror films, and Christopher Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone is also one of the best contextualized introductions to the Western Italian Style. Gary Needham’s “Playing with Genre: Defining the Italian Giallo” is particularly helpful for English readers still puzzled about the exact parameters of this popular but elusive genre. Austin Fisher’s Blood on the Streets, on the other hand, analyzes the depiction of violence in several of the genres, beginning with the poliziesco but then also ranging across the giallo and Mafia films. If not exclusively, Italian cinema has undoubtedly been a cinema of auteurs, of directors who approach their filmmaking as a form of personal and artistic expression. Forced by necessity and reasons of space, we have limited our bibliographies to writings on 15 major directors. Our selection of materials has aimed at utility and accessibility rather than mere inclusiveness, and, always with an eye to the non-Italian reader, we have attempted, wherever possible, to indicate relevant works in English. It is regrettable that almost nothing has appeared in English on a major figure such as Dino Risi, although the volume dedicated to him by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and edited by Angela Prudenzi and Cristina Scogliamiglio, Dino Risi: Maestro dell’equilibrio e della leggerezza, amply indicates his status as one of the great Italian directors of the postwar period. But filmmaking is undoubtedly an industry as well as an art. While this has been a road less traveled by scholarship, in Italian a valiant first attempt to provide a history of the industry was made in the immediate postwar period by Libero Bizzarri and Libero Solaroli in their L’industria cinematografica italiana. A more extended account covering the period to the early 1980s was later offered in Lorenzo Quaglietti’s Storia economico-politica del cinema Italiano 1945–1980, which was itself further updated to arrive at the end of the first century of the industry in Barbara Corsi’s Storia economica del cinema italiano. In English, Cristina Degli-Esposti Reinhert offered a concise overview of the industry in her article on Italy in Gorham Kindem’s anthology The International Movie Industry. A much more comprehensive and detailed account has now been made available to English readers in Marina Nicoli’s The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry, although regrettably Nicoli fails to follow the industry through into the new millennium. An even more attractive snapshot of the industry in its golden era is available to both English and Italian readers in the rich store of historical and personal reminiscences gathered by Stefano Della Casa and lavishly illustrated in his Capitani Coraggiosi: Produttori italiani 1945–1975 (Captains Courageous: Italian Producers 1945–1975).

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Continuing passion and enthusiasm for Italian cinema have inevitably led to the establishment of a huge number of websites supplying a great deal of information on all its aspects. The major state film institutions, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Cinecittà, and LUCE all have very informative and user-friendly sites, with LUCE offering a searchable archive of materials that can be viewed online (in Italian only and registration required). Italian film studies now also has its own dedicated journal, the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, available online, although it too requires registration. While internet sites can disappear as well as appear, all the ones listed here are active at time of writing.

GENERAL OVERVIEWS Bayman, Louis, ed. Directory of World Cinema. Vol. 6, Italy. Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect; University of Chicago Press, 2011. Bayman, Louis, and Sergio Rigoletto, eds. Popular Italian Cinema. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bertellini, Giorgio. The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower, 2004. Bertetto, Paolo, ed. Storia del cinema italiano: Uno sguardo d’insieme. Venice; Rome: Marsilio Editore; Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 2011. Boero, Davide. Chitarre e lucchetti: Il cinema adolescente da Morandi a Moccia. Recco, Genoa: Le mani, 2009. Bolzoni, Francesco, Mario Foglietti, and Soveria Mannelli, eds. Le stagioni del cinema: Trenta registi si raccontano. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2000. Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. London; New York: Continuum, 2009. ———, ed. The Italian Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: Continuum, 2001. Bondanella, Peter, and Federico Pacchioni. A History of Italian Cinema. 2nd ed. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Brizio-Skov, Flavia. Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society. London; New York: Tauris, 2011. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cent’anni di cinema italiano. 2 vols. Rome: Laterza, 1995. ———. Guida alla storia del cinema italiano: 1905–2003. Turin: Einaudi, 2003.

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———. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Canova, Gianni, ed. Voglia di cinema: Comunicazione e promozione del film in Italia. Udine: Forum, 2013. Cavallini, Roberto, ed. Requiem for a Nation: Religion and Politics in Post War Italian Cinema. Milan: Mimesis International, 2017. Celli, Carlo, and Marga Cottino-Jones. A New Guide to Italian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Clemenzi, Laura. Il cinema d’impresa: La lingua dei documentari industriali italiani del secondo dopoguerra. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 2018. Dalle Vacche, Angela. The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. De Franceschi, Leonardo, ed. L’Africa in Italia: Per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano. Rome: Aracne, 2013. De Gaetano, Roberto, ed. Lessico del cinema italiano: Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita. Vol. 1. Milan: Mimesis, 2014. De Pau, Daniela, and Simone Dubrovic, eds. Zoom d’oltreoceano: Istantanee sui registi italiani e sull’Italia. Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 2010. Della Casa, Stefano. Storia e storie del cinema popolare italiano. Turin: La Stampa, 2001. Di Carmine, Roberta. Italy Meets Africa: Colonial Discourses in Italian Cinema. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Dipartimento per l’informazione e l’editoria. L’arte di tutte le arti: Il centenario del cinema in Italia. Rome: Dipartimento per l’Informazione e l’Editoria, 1995. Ente Cinema, Cinecittà, and Istituto LUCE. La città del cinema: I primi cento anni del cinema italiano. Milan: Skira, 1995. Faldini, Franca, and Goffredo Fofi, eds. L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano. 2nd ed. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2009. Ferrero-Regis, Tiziana. Recent Italian Cinema: Spaces, Contexts, Experiences. Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2009. Gennari, Daniela. Post-war Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests. New York: Routledge, 2008. Giacovelli, Enrico. Un secolo di cinema italiano 1900–1999. 2 vols. Turin: Lindau, 2002. Giori, Mauro. Homosexuality and Italian Cinema: From the Fall of Fascism to the Years of Lead. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Giraldi, Massimo, Enrico Lancia, and Fabio Melelli. Il doppiaggio nel cinema italiano. Rome: Bulzoni, 2010.

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Gundle, Stephen. “From Neorealism to Luci Rosse: Cinema, Politics, Society, 1945–85.” In Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Robert Lumley. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Hughes, Howard. Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult. London: Tauris, 2011. Landy, Marcia. Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Marlow-Mann, Alex. The New Neapolitan Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Melanco, Mirco. “Il motivo del viaggio nel cinema italiano (1945–1965).” In Identità italiana e identità europea nel cinema italiano dal 1945 al miracolo economico, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta, 217–308. Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1996. O’Rawe, Catherine. Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pezzotti, Barbara. Investigating Italy’s Past through Historical Crime Fiction, Films, and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Reteuna, Daria. Cinema di carta: Storia fotografica del cinema italiano. Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2000. Rigoletto, Sergio. Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Rohdie, Sam. “A Brief History of the Italian Cinema.” Metro 1211, no. 122 (2000): 101–12. Russo, Paolo. Breve storia del cinema italiano. Turin: Lindau, 2002. ———. Storia del cinema italiano. Turin: Lindau, 2007. Scorsese, Martin. My Voyage to Italy. DVD. Los Angeles: Miramax, 2003. Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, ed. Storia del cinema italiano. Vols. 7–13. Venice: Marsilio; Rome: Edizioni Bianco & Nero, 2001–2004. Sisto, Antonella C. Film Sound in Italy: Listening to the Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema 1896–1996. New York: Routledge, 1996. Uva, Christian, ed. Strane storie: Il cinema e i misteri d’Italia. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011. Vighi, Fabio. Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious. Bristol, UK; Portland, OR: Intellect, 2006. Vitti, Antonio. Cinema Italiano Contemporaneo. Annali d’italianistica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012.

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———, ed. Incontri con il cinema italiano. Caltanissetta, Sicily: Salvatore Sciascia, 2003. Wagstaff, Christopher. “Cinema.” In Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Winston, Sherly. Know All about Cinema of Italy. New Delhi: World Technologies, 2012. Wood, Mary P. Italian Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

DICTIONARIES, COMPANIONS, AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES Burke, Frank, ed. A Companion to Italian Cinema. Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Canova, Gianni, ed. Enciclopedia del cinema. Milan: Garzanti, 2002. Cardullo, Bert. What Is Neorealism? A Critical English-Language Bibliography of Italian Cinematic Neorealism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. Chiti, Roberto. Dizionario dei registi del cinema muto italiano. Rome: MICS, 1997. Di Giammatteo, Fernaldo, with Cristina Bragaglia. Dizionario del cinema italiano: Dagli inizi del secolo a oggi, i film che hanna segnato la storia del nostro cinema. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1995. Farinotti, Pino. Dizionario dei film gialli. Carnago, Varese, Italy: SugarCo, 1993. ———. Dizionario dei film western. Carnago, Varese, Italy: SugarCo, 1993. Fugheri, Ennio. Manuale del cinema italiano. Milan: Swan, 1998. Gremese (various editors). Dizionario del cinema italiano. 6 vols. Rome: Gremese, 1991–2000. Lancia, Enrico, and Roberto Poppi. Gialli, polizieschi, thriller: Tutti i film italiani dal 1930 al 2000. Rome: Gremese, 2004. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, with James Hay and Gianni Volpi. The Companion to Italian Cinema. London: Cassell, 1996. Pergolari, Andrea. Dizionario dei protagonisti del cinema comico e della commedia italiana. Rome: Un Mondo a Parte, 2003. ———. Dizionario del cinema poliziottesco e del giallo italiano. Rome: Un Mondo a Parte, 2012. Pilo, Gianni. Dizionario dell’orrore: Una guida fondamentale. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2004. Senatore, Ignazio. Psyco-Cult: Psicodizionario del cinema di genere. Turin: Centro Scientifico Editore, 2006.

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SILENT CINEMA Alovisio, Silvio. “The ‘Pastrone System’: Itala Film from the Origins to World War I.” Film History 12, no. 3 (2000): 250–61. Bernardini, Aldo. Il cinema muto italiano. 3 vols. Rome: Laterza, 1980–1982. ———. Cinema italiano delle origini: Gli ambulanti. Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli, 2001. ———. Il cinema muto italiano. Vol. 1, Film dal vero, 1895–1914. Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli, 2002. ———. Le imprese di produzione del cinema muto italiano. Bologna: Paolo Emilio Persiani, 2015. ———. Cinema muto italiano: protagonisti. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2018. ———. “An Industry in Recession: The Italian Film Industry 1908–1909.” Film History 3 (1989): 341–68. Bernardini, Aldo, Vittorio Martinelli, and Matilde Tortora. Enrico Guazzoni: Regista pittore. Cosenza: Mongolfiera, 2005. Bertellini, Giorgio, ed. Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader. New Barnet, Herts, UK: John Libbey, 2013. Bertetto, Paolo, and Gianni Rondolino, eds. Cabiria e il suo tempo. Milan: Il Castoro, 1998. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema muto 1895–1929. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993. Bruscolini, Elisabetta, Angela Prudenzi, and Sergio Toffetti. La fiamma del peccato: L’eros nel cinema muto. Turin: Lindau, 1997. Centro Culturale dell’Immagine Il Fotogramma, ed. Dive e divi del cinema muto italiano: Accademia delle arti e nuove tecnologie. Rome: Sintesi Grafica, 1995. De Berti, Raffaele. “Milano Films: The Exemplary History of a Film Company of the 1910s.” Film History 12 (2000): 276–87. Gianetto, Claudia. “The Giant Ambrosio, or Italy’s Most Prolific Silent Film Company.” Film History 12 (2000): 240–49. Jandelli, Cristina. Le dive italiane del cinema muto. Palermo: L’Epos, 2006. Paolella, Roberto. Storia del cinema muto. Naples: Giannini, 1956. Prolo, Maria Adriana. Storia del cinema muto italiano. Milan: Poligono Societa Editrice di Milano, 1951. Redi, Riccardo. Cinema muto italiano (1896–1930). Turin: Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, 1999. ———. La Cines: Storia d’una casa di produzione italiana. Bologna: Paolo Emilio Persiani Editore, 2009.

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Reich, Jacqueline. The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Renzi, Renzo, ed. Sperduto nel buio: Il cinema muto italiano e il suo tempo, 1905–1930. Bologna: Cappelli, 1991. Rondolino, Gianni. Il cinema muto. Turin: UTET, 1996. Tomadjoglou, Kimberly. “Rome’s Premiere Film Studio: Società Italiana Cines.” Film History 12 (2000): 262–75.

SOUND CINEMA Fascism Aprà, Adriano, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, eds. I favolosi anni trenta: Cinema italiano, 1929–1944. Milan: Electa, 1979. Argentieri, Mino. L’occhio del regime. Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. ———, ed. Risate di regime: La commedia italiana 1930–1944. Venice: Marsilio, 1991. ———, ed. Schermi di guerra: Cinema italiano 1939–1945. Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Aristarco, Guido. Il cinema fascista: Il prima e il dopo. Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Bernagozzi, Giampaolo. “Il cinema nel ventennio fascista.” In Storia del cinema: Dall’affermazione del sonoro al neorealismo, edited by Adelio Ferrero. Venice: Marsilio, 1978. ———. Il mito dell’immagine. Bologna: CLUEB, 1983. Bosworth, R. J. B. “Film Memories of Fascism.” In Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation, edited by R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. ———. “The Traces of Fascism in Music, Film, Literature and Memory: A Fascist Cultural Legacy?” In The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism. London: Arnold, 1998. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cinema italiano tra le due guerre: Fascismo e politica cinematografica. Milan: Mursia, 1975. ———. Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema del regime, 1929–1945. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Brusaporco, Ugo. I monelli di Verona: Cinema e fascismo in città. Verona: Bonato, 1997. Cannistraro, Philip V. “Il cinema.” In La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media. Rome: Laterza, 1975.

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Casadio, Gianfranco. Il grigio e il nero: Spettacolo e propaganda nel cinema italiano degli anni trenta (1931–1943). Ravenna: Longo, 1989. Casadio, Gianfranco, Ernesto G. Laura, and Filippo Cristiano. Telefoni bianchi: Realtà e finzione nella società e nel cinema italiano degli anni quaranta. Ravenna: Longo, 1991. Cavallo, Pietro, Luigi Goglia, and Pasquale Iaccio. Cinema a passo romano: Trent’anni di fascismo sullo schermo (1934–1963). Napoli: Liguori, 2012. Freddi, Luigi. Il cinema: Il governo dell’immagine. Rome: Gremese, 1994. Gili, Jean A. L’Italie de Mussolini et son cinéma. Paris: Veyrier, 1985. ———. Stato fascista e cinematografia: Repressione e promozione. Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Gori, Gianfranco Miro. Patria diva: La storia d’Italia nei film del ventennio. Florence: La Casa Usher, 1988. Gori, Gianfranco Miro, and Carlo De Maria, eds. Il cinema nel fascismo. Bologna: BraDypUS Communicating Cultural Heritage, 2017. Gundle, Stephen. Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Hay, James. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Iaccio, Pasquale, ed. “La villeggiatura” di Marco Leto: Un film sul confine fascista. Naples: Liguori Editore, 2018. Landy, Marcia. Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———. The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Lichtner, Giacomo. Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Mancini, Elaine. Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930–1935. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985. Manetti, Daniela. Un’arma poderosissima: Industria cinematografica e stato durante il fascismo, 1922–1943. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2012. Marasti, Alfredo. Storia e rappresentazione: Come il cinema italiano ha raccontato il fascismo. Ancona: Affinità elettive, 2015. Marino, Natalia, and Emanuele Valerio Marino. L’ovra a Cinecittà: Polizia politica e spie in camicia nera. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005. Mereu Keating, Carla. The Politics of Dubbing: Film Censorship and State Intervention in the Translation of Foreign Cinema in Fascist Italy. Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2016. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. “The Italian Cinema under Fascism.” In Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture, edited by David Forgacs. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Redi, Riccardo, ed. Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo. Venice: Marsilio, 1979.

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Setti, Raffaella. 2001. Cinema a due voci: Il parlato nei film di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Florence: Cesati, 2001. Zagarrio, Vito, ed. Utopisti esagerati: Il cinema di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Venice: Marsilio, 2004. Visconti, Luchino Aristarco, Guido. Su Visconti: Materiali per una analisi critica. Rome: La Zattera di Babele, 1986. Bacon, Henry. Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Barbera, Alberto, and Raffaella Isoardi, eds. L’estetica dello sguardo: L’arte di Luchino Visconti. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo, 2006. Biondi, Teresa. Il cinema antropomorfico di Luchino Visconti: L’affresco umano degli antieroi viscontiani. Turin: Meti Edizioni, 2016. Blom, Ivo. Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art. Leiden: Sidestone, 2018. Cavallaro, Giovanni Battista, ed. Luchino Visconti: Senso. Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. D’Amico de Carvalho, Caterina, ed. Life and Work of Luchino Visconti. Rome: Cinecittà International, 1997. ———, ed. Luchino Visconti e il suo tempo. Milan: Electa, 2006. De Berti, Raffaele, ed. Il cinema di Luchino Visconti tra società e altre arti: Analisi di film. Milan: CUEM, 2005. De Giusti, Luciano. I film di Luchino Visconti. Rome: Gremese, 1990. Dombroski, Robert. “Giuseppe Tommasi di Lampedusa and Luchino Visconti: Substances of Form.” In Properties of Writing: Ideological Discourse in Modern Italian Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Dü ttmann, Alexander García. Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood. Translated from the German by Robert Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Fumagalli, Paola. “Il gattopardo”: Dal romanzo al film. Florence: Firenze Libri, 1988. Gastel Chiarelli, Cristina. Musica e memoria nell’arte di Luchino Visconti. Milan: Archinto, 1997. Giori, Mauro. Luchino Visconti: Rocco e i suoi fratelli. Torino: Lindau, 2011. ———. Scandalo e banalità : Rappresentazioni dell’eros in Luchino Visconti (1963–1976). Milan: LED, 2012.

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Hillman, Roger. “Pivot Chords: Austrian Music and Visconti’s Senso (1954).” In Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Mannino, Franco. Visconti e la musica. Lucca: Akademos & LIM, 1994. Mazzocchi, Federica. Le regie teatrali di Luchino Visconti: Dagli esordi a Morte di un commesso viaggiatore. Rome: Bulzoni, 2010. ———, ed. Luchino Visconti, la macchina e le muse. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2008. Micciché, Lino. Luchino Visconti: Un profilo critico. Venice: Marsilio, 2002. ———, ed. “La terra trema” di Luchino Visconti: Analisi di un capolavoro. Turin: Associazione Philip Morris Progetto Cinema, 1994. Naglia, Sandra. Mann, Mahler, Visconti: “Morte a Venezia.” Pescara: Tracce, 1995. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Luchino Visconti. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Partridge, C. J. Senso: Visconti’s Film and Boito’s Novella: A Case Study in the Relation between Literature and Film. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Pravadelli, Veronica, ed. Il cinema di Luchino Visconti. Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Rohdie, Sam. Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli). London: British Film Institute, 1992. Schifano, Laurence. Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion. London: Collins, 1990. Servadio, Gaia. Luchino Visconti: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982. Tonetti, Claretta Micheletti. Luchino Visconti. New York: Twayne, 1997. Tramontana, Gaetano. Invito al cinema di Luchino Visconti. Milan: Mursia, 2003. Wertmü ller, Lina Bullaro, Grace Russo. Man in Disorder: The Cinema of Lina Wertmü ller in the 1970s. Leicester: Troubador, 2006. Cascone, Claudia. Il Sud di Lina Wertmü ller. Naples: Guida, 2006. Consolati, Claudia. “Grotesque Bodies, Fragmented Selves: Lina Wertmü ller’s Women in Love and Anarchy (1973).” In Italian Women Filmmakers and the Gendered Screen, edited by Maristella Cantini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. “Issues of Authorship and the Case of Lina Wertmü ller.” In Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. London: Continuum, 2001. Hopkins, Hwa Soon Anchisi, and Luke Cuculis. “Don’t Bring a Gun to a Fistfight: Deconstructing Hegemonic Masculinity through the Gun in Pasqualino Settebellezze.” In Italian Women Filmmakers and the Gendered Screen, edited by Maristella Cantini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Michalczyk, John J. “Lina Wertmü ller: The Politics of Sexuality.” In The Italian Political Filmmakers. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986. Rigoletto, Sergio. “Laughter and the Popular in Lina Wertmü ller’s The Seduction of Mimi.” In Popular Italian Cinema, edited by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

THE INDUSTRY Bernardini, Aldo, and Vittorio Martinelli. Titanus: La storia di tutti i film di una grande casa di produzione. Milan: Coliseum, 1986. Bizzarri, Libero, and Libero Solaroli. L’industria cinematografica italiana. Florence: Parenti, 1958. Cordaro, Chiara. “Censimento 1: Case di produzione e produttori.” In La “scuola” italiana: Storia, strutture, e immaginario di un altro cinema, 1988–1996, edited by Mario Sesti. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Corsi, Barbara. Con qualche dollaro in meno: Storia economica del cinema italiano. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. ———. Produzione e produttori. Milan: Il castoro, 2012. ———. “Staying Alive: The Italian Film Industry from the Postwar to Today.” In A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke. Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Cucco, Marco, and Giacomo Manzoli, eds. Il cinema di Stato: Finanziamento pubblico ed economia simbolica nel cinema italiano contemporaneo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017. Degli-Esposti Reinert, Cristina. “Italy.” In The International Movie Industry, edited by Gorham Kindem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Della Casa, Stefano, ed. Capitani coraggiosi: Produttori italiani 1945–1975 / Captains Courageous: Italian Producers 1945–1975. Translated by Christopher Evans. Milan: Mondadori Electa, La Biennale di Venezia, 2003.

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Di Chiara, Francesco. Generi e industria cinematografica in Italia: Il caso Titanus (1949–1964). Turin: Lindau, 2013. Germani, Sergio M., Simone Starace, and Roberto Turigliatto, eds. Titanus: Family Diary of Italian cinema / Cronaca familiare del cinema italiano. Rome: Edizioni Sabinæ, 2014. Magrelli, Enrico, ed. Sull’industria cinematografica italiana. Venice: Marsilio, 1986. Nicoli, Marina. The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry. London; New York: Routledge, 2017. Quaglietti, Lorenzo. Storia economico-politica del cimema italiano: 1945–1980. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980. Wagstaff, Christopher. “Italian Genre Films in the World Market.” In Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity, 1945–95, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Stephen Ricci. London: British Film Institute, 1998. Zagarrio, Vito, ed. Dietro lo schermo: Ragionamenti sui modi di produzione cinematografici in Italia. Venice: Marsilio, 1988. Zanchi, Claudio. “L’industria cinematografica italiana del prima dopoguerra.” In Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, edited by Lino Micciché. Venice: Marsilio, 1975.

WEBSITES Accademia Del Cinema Italiano—Premio David di Donatello: https:// www.daviddidonatello.it (in Italian) ANAC (Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici): https://www.anacautori.it/online/ (in Italian) ANICA (Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali): www.anica.it/ (in Italian) Archivio del Cinema Italiano—Italian Cinema Database: http://www .archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/ (in Italian) Archivio del Cinema Muto: https://sempreinpenombra.com (in Italian) Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema: http://www .airsc.org (in Italian) B-Movie Zone: https://bmoviezone.wordpress.com (searchable in Italian) Box Office Italia: http://www.hitparadeitalia.it/bof/boi/index.html (searchable in Italian) Box Office Mojo (Italian Yearly Box Office): https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/?area=IT (searchable in English) Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (National Film School): http://www. fondazionecsc.it (in Italian)

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Cinecensura (100 Years of Film Censorship in Italy): http://cinecensura.com (in Italian) Cinecittà News: https://news.cinecitta.com/IT/it-it/cms/39/news.aspx (Italian/English) CineCriticaWeb (SNCCI): http://www.cinecriticaweb.it/sic-film/drift/ (in Italian) Cinemagazine Web (website of Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani): http://www.cinemagazineweb.it (in Italian) Cinemaitaliano: https://www.cinemaitaliano.info (searchable database in Italian) Cinematografo (Fondazione Ente Dello Spettacolo): https://www. cinematografo.it (in Italian) Close-up: www.close-up.it (in Italian) Il corto (L’enciclopedia dei cortometraggi [Encyclopedia of Short Films]): http://www.ilcorto.eu (in Italian) Dizionario Autori Cinema: http://www.girodivite.it/antenati/mg_autcm.htm (in Italian) Enciclopedia del Cinema Italiano: https://sites.google.com/site/enciclopediadelcinemaitaliano/home (searchable in Italian) Giallo Cinema: https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Giallo_Cinema:_ Spaghetti_Slashers (in English but need to subscribe) Images Online Journal, “Issue 5: The Golden Age of Italian Horror, 1957–1979”: www.images journal.com/issue05/infocus.htm (in English) Images Online Journal, “Issue 6: Spaghetti Westerns”: www.imagesjournal.com/issue06/infocus/spaghetti.htm (in English) L’ITALIA TAGLIA (website for research into film censorship in Italy, with searchable database): http://www.italiataglia.it/home (in Italian) Italian Film Commissions: http://www.italianfilmcommissions.it/en/ (in English) Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies: http://www.intellect books.com/journal-of-italian-cinema-media-studies (in English) LUCE—Archive: https://www.archivioluce.com (searchable in Italian) LUCE—CINECITTÀ Home: https://cinecitta.com (Italian/English) Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Museum of Cinema): http:// www.museo cinema.it/it (in Italian) Nastri d’argento—Albo d’oro: http://www.nastridargento.it/albo-doro/ (searchable index in Italian) Nocturno: http://www.nocturno.it (in Italian) L’occhio delle donne—Le registe e i loro film: http:// www.occhiodelledonne.it/ (searchable database in Italian) Off Screen: A Genealogy of Italian Popular Cinema: https://offscreen.com/ issues/view/the_italian_filone (in English)

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100autori (Associazione della Autorialità Cinetelevisiva): http://www.kmstudio.net/clienti/100autori.it/home (in Italian) Poliziottesco Italiano: https://poliziescoitaliano.blogspot.com (in Italian) Pollanet Squad (Italian crime website): http://www.pollanetsquad.it (searchable in Italian) Portale Cinema Muto Italiano: https://www.ilcinemamuto.it/betatest/ (searchable index in Italian) Portale Italiano sul Cinema Documentario: www.ildocumentario.it (searchable archive in Italian) Quinlan: Rivista di Critica Cinematografica: https://quinlan.it/ (in Italian) Sentieri Selvaggi: www.sentieriselvaggi.it (in Italian) Stanze del Cinema: https://stanzedicinema.com (in Italian) Venice Biennale Cinema Home: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2020 (Italian/English) Westerns . . . all’italiana: https://westernsallitaliana.blogspot.com (in English) Women Film Pioneers Project: https://wfpp.columbia.edu (in English)

About the Author

Gino Moliterno was born in Italy but grew up in Sydney, Australia. He completed both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney, where he received his doctorate for a thesis on the Renaissance poet and philosopher Giordano Bruno. After teaching Italian language and literature at a number of Australian and New Zealand universities, he joined the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, where he taught in— and served for many years as the convener of—the Italian Studies Program. In the mid-1990s, he helped establish the Film Studies Program at the ANU, in which he taught and which he periodically headed. During his academic career, his research ranged widely in publications ranging from articles on Dante and James Joyce, and an annotated translation of Giordano Bruno’s 16th-century comedy, Candlebearer, to Sydney and the Italian Touch, an anthology of reminiscences of Italian Australians in Sydney, coedited with Roberto Pettini. In 2000, he served as general editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture, for which he also wrote many of the film entries, while also contributing regularly to the online film journals Screening the Past and Senses of Cinema. Most recently, before retiring, he coauthored a monograph on Italian-Australian filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele. Produced in retirement, the present volume is an augmented and updated edition of his Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema (2008).

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