Cinecittà 2006–17

CITTÀ

CINE MF

A

2006—17

ERIK DETTWILER

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dewil.ch—2017

Edition Haus am Gern

B 1

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Edition Haus am Gern – 2502 Biel/Bienne edition@hausamgern.ch | www.edition-hausamgern.ch

first edition, June, 2017 isbn: 978-3-9524642-2-9 • design and layout: dewil.ch projects concept, idea, text and photographs: Erik Dettwiler 4u@dewil.ch | www.dewil.ch by-nc-nd—Berlin—2017

CITTÀ

CINE 2006–17

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Erik Dettwiler

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To my love Lerato & Lewatle our ocean

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LA STRADA1 Main road or backstreet: The cinematic space deconstructed by way of street name signs For almost two and a half years, between September 2004 and February 2007, I lived in Rome. This preliminary text recounts a personal journey from the ancient to the post-modern city. Its content deals with architectonic spaces, historical and legendary events and places. It leads to and concludes with the photographical series: ‘Cinecittà’. The photographic series, which was predominantly realized in 2006, depicts streets and places of Rome that are named after deceased protagonists of Italian cinema.

There is the saying: “All roads lead to Rome”.2 The ancient Romans were famous for their road building techniques, which allowed them to shift their legions quickly from one end of the Empire to the other and simply led to their predominance, resulting in vast opportunities for trade and communication. We might see some analogy in the über-connected world of today and the possibility and the power of information which travels at the speed of light, via the rhizomatic data networks, and reaches the recipient on the other side of the globe immediately.

Between 2005 and 2007, I stayed in a block of flats, erected in the late 1950s for the 1960 XVII Olympic 1 La Strada (The Road) is a 1954 Italian neorealistic drama directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano.

2 “All Roads Lead to Rome” is the modern reading of a medieval statement, apparently originally a reference to Roman roads generally and the Milliarium Aureum (Golden Milestone) specifically. As a proverb, it refers to the fact that many routes can lead to a given result.

Games in Rome. The apartment was located on the Via Unione Sovietica street. The street name seems like a rather anachronistic and bizarre coincidence. The complex was designed and built by a group of architects, amongst them Adalberto Libera3, who is known for designing the Casa Malaparte on the Isola di Capri. The mansion is a peculiar example of modernistic architecture and famous for its part of being a backdrop in Jean Luc Godard’s movie Le Mépris (Contempt), starring the abusive and self-absorbed (very masculine) Michel Piccoli and a dazzling (very feminine) Brigitte Bardot—whose character is going through a boredomism stage.

The apartment offered a particular view over the boundaries of the Villaggio Olimpico. Right below the kitchen window I would catch sight of the Villaggio’s key construction in the form of the Palazzetto dello Sport, conceptualized by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi 6 Nervi4. He not only pioneered the Y-shaped pillars, which7 entirely surround the circular form of the Palazzetto, the Y’s are also carry and connect the slightly bulged cupola with the street level. Nearby the Palazzetto, Nervi also designed the prosaic yet refined pillars which sustain the elevated motorway of the Corso di Francia, that cuts the entire neighborhood in half. From the living room of the apartment and on the other side of the concrete 3 Alberto Libera (1903–1963) was a representative exponent of the Italian Modern movement and founder of the Italian Movement for Rational Architecture (M.I.A.R.) with close ties to the fascist government of Mussolini.

4 Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) was an Italian engineer. Nervi is widely known as a structural engineer and an architect, and for his innovative use of reinforced concrete. He would borrow from Roman and Renaissance architecture while applying ribbing and vaulting to improve strength and simultaneously eliminating sustaining elements as columns.

tarmac stretch, I could see the three raised super-sized shields, looking like gigantic prehistoric reptiles—that are sheltering Rome’s Auditorium, designed by Renzo Piano5.

Around the corner and out of sight from my prior lookout, you could see an emerging and experimentallike construction site of Zaha Hadid’s6 museum. The eventually realized MAXXI7, on the former area of barracks, expresses an architectonical language of bending and overlapping elements with multilateral intersections.

The Olympic village is based in the Quartiere Flaminio. I once visited the Ara Pacis—the Altar of Augustan Peace. In its accompanying exhibition, an architectonic model showed the original urbanist setting and the origins of the Via Flaminia. I noted with astonishment, that after more than 2,000 years the very same road was still passing in front of my former living 8 quarters.

9 I realized that if I would have strayed some few hundred meters from my apartment in a Northern 5 Renzo Piano (1937–) is an Italian architect who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998. “His designs are about tranquillity, not conflict. The serenity of his best buildings can almost make you believe that we live in a civilized world”. Ouroussof, NY-Times, May 13, 2009, p. C1, www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/arts/design/14muse. html.

6 Zaha Hadid who in 2004 became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is known for the powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures. She was born in Iraq in 1950, a time when Modernism connoted glamor and progressive thinking in the Middle East, and was raised in one of Baghdad’s first Bauhaus-inspired houses, http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/ people/h/zaha_hadid/index.html.

7 MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (National Museum of the 21st Century Art), a museum that combines contemporary art and architecture.

direction, on the Via Flaminia, I would have crossed the Tiber elegantly on Ponte Milvio. Approx 1,700 years ago I would have stepped right into the heart of the legendary Battle of the Milvian Bridge of 312 CE. This is where the Roman Emperor Constantine, eventually won the combat. According to historians, the battle would mark the beginning of Constantine’s conversion into Christianity. A recount8 tells how the Emperor’s vision led to painting the sign of the Chi-Rho9 on the soldiers’ shields, a move that would ensure victory.

Who knows, if Constantine’s vision failed and he would have been defeated, Europe would now be practicing Mithraic mysteries10 instead of Christian liturgy.

However, Mithras killing a sacred bull would stand in odd opposition to Greek mythology of Europa’s abduction by Zeus, in the form of a white bull.

Philosophically, one could complement the argument and imagine Minotaur11 still caught in his maze with Icarus however flying too high and in conclusion it 8

By Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339 CE), exegete and Christian polemicist.

9 The Chi-Rho is one of the earliest forms of christogram. It is formed by superimposing the first two (capital) letters chi and rho (XP) of the Greek word “Christ” in such a way that the vertical stroke of the rho intersects the center of the chi..

10 Archeological finds show iconic scenes of Mithras being born from a rock, slaughtering a bull and sharing a banquet with the god Sol (sun). Worshippers of Mithras had a complex system of seven grades of initiation and with ritual meals. The cult appears to have had its centre in Rome.

11 In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur dwelt at the center of the Labyrinth, which was an elaborate maze-like construction designed by the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus, on the command of King Minos of Crete. The Minotaur was eventually killed by the Athenian hero Theseus.

would nonetheless perfectly match the occidental version of the narrative. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, according to Dürrenmatt, would redeem Minotaur through other means than Theseus did—who killed him. It would instead set him free by transforming him to become a human being. Imagine Kant, enjoying himself as Minotaur’s metaphysical teacher, enlightening Minotaur to bear the prison of knowledge and showing implicit human liberty of the mind, which would enable him to rupture his own prison, through the acknowledgement of it.12 The ancient Roman controlled their Empire via their superior road system, with the most known roads like Aurelia, Casilina, Flaminia, Tiburtina etc. still inscribed in the modern-day neighborhoods of the capital. The medieval Rome received an important urban renewal under the auspices of 16th century Popes in CounterReformation times. The city map received a modernistic retouch and some new routes and road axis to handle respectively bigger masses of pilgrims through the city’s center. Ancient Egyptian and ancient Roman obelisks13 were placed in front of important churches as landmarks—phallocratic symbols of heavenly connection and earthly directives of the Catholic church.

Over time Rome’s existence and its urban space underwent a constant process of shaping and reshaping the cityscape—enforced by known and unknown forces of power and facts. In Learning from Las Vegas (a 1972 study by Venturi et al.), we are confronted with a revolutionary 18th century city map of Rome by

Giambattista Nolli.14 The map highlights for the very first time, a division between the private and the public space.

This is evident in its layout, the churches for example, but also other public buildings or public patios are presented in their totality and denoted as public space or as Venturi (et al.) describes Nolli’s map, that highlights the complexity and relation of the public space in Rome.

The gray hatched layouts of private space is broken up and surrounded from public space, open space or accessible sheltered space (with all its singular details) and graphically treated as one.15 What stands behind a notion of a central and accessible public space and how many diverse and complex ideas of approaches for this public realm, are possible and welcomed?

For more than two decades Benito Mussolini was Italy’s ruler and one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. Mussolini planed and realized some lasting 8 transformations in Rome’s cityscape. Massive workforce 9 must have been called from all over Italy to accomplish the dictator’s monumental visions and interventions.

This encouraged a need of public housing projects, which would accommodate the laborers and their families, since the population tripled in only about 40 years.

In post-WWII Italy the building frenzy would resume, though in a different spirit and more importantly the city center would remain untouched, for once. Neorealismo, a new intellectual current emerged in the 1940s and would overturn the fascist ideology based on a charismatic leader dictating and orchestrating the masses. Henceforth

12 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Turmbau, Stoffe IV–IX, Zürich, 1990, p. 122.

14 Giambattista Nolli (1701–1756) was an Italian architect and surveyor. He is best known for his iconographic plan of Rome commissioned by Pope Benedict XIV and completed in 1748.

13 At least eight obelisks created in antiquity by the Egyptians were taken from Egypt after the Roman conquest and brought to Rome.

15 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Part I), The MIT Press, 1972–77, p. 18.

Neorealism would become the main topic for Italy’s literature and cinematic movement, reflected in everyday practice, and subsequently end up in the architectural field. The Italian journalist Nicola Chiaromonte wrote that: “[Italian fascism] pretended to be ‘heroic’, ‘Machiavellian’, and ‘spiritualistic’. […] the Italians had to be optimistic and see only ‘positive’ and uplifting aspects of life and society around them. […] Newspapers were forbidden to publish news about murders, suicides, adultery, vice, and other ‘negative’ occurrences and the writers were told in [not] so many words that any description of the ‘lower depths’ of Italian society—in fact, anything that was not shiny, joyful, or promising—would be considered a sneaking attack against the regime”.16 In an essay about Italian neorealist cinema, Lorenzo Borgotallo reflects: “Italian neorealism is thus more about new ways of looking at reality than about realism per se. It 10 is the cinematic rendering of a new epistemological 11 attitude, the reappropriation and reinvention of cinema, after the traumatic experiences of Fascism and World War II”.17 And Italo Calvino describes in an important preface to his novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders: “Neorealism was not a school (let us try to be precise).

It was a chorus of voices, mainly peripheral, a manifold discovery of the different Italy—especially the Italy which had hitherto received little publicity in literature. Without the variety of Italy, unknown or supposedly unknown to each other, without the variety of dialects and slang to leaven and mix in with the literary language, there would

have been no Neorealism. But it was not ‘countrified’ in the sense of nineteenth-century regional verismo.

Local characterization was employed to give a ring of truth to situations recognizable as universal”.18 A concept committed toward the real, connected to the stories and struggles of the daily routine, outlining an uneasy reality: the one that society would try to deny on a regular basis.19 This very concept found its influence in form of an underlying sentiment, while reflecting the actual and historic architectonic space of Italy in the early 1950s.

INA-Casa20 was a national public housing development program of the government with the notion to put the economy back on track after the turmoil of WWII. The architectonic concept of Neorealism played its important part by giving this enterprise a physical identity. This was based among other things, on the practicality of construction: the choices of material, the consideration of sociological and psychological interpretations of the environment etc. The vernacular Italian architecture and its multiplicity of identities became the centerpiece of this very purpose. The INACasa projects stood at the forefront of the post-WWII sprawling and shaping of Rome’s vast outskirts. ***

18

Italo Calvino, Preface, “Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno”, Einaudi, 1964.

19 Roland Barthes, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italienischer_ Neorealismus.

16 “Realism and Neorealism in Contemporary Italian Literature”, Nicola Chiaromonte, in: The English Journal, vol. XLII, May 1953, p. 239.

17 Lorenzo Borgotallo, The Italian Neorealist Experience, in: A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke, Chichester 2017, p. 123.

20 (INA) National Institute of Assurance originated in 1912, promoted after 1949 constructions of public housing projects.

This development plan implied a typical Keynesian approach with structural stimulus putting people back to work and appointing small enterprises through the construction activities.

The curiosity about what lies outside of Rome’s dense historic center across the Aurelian Walls and beyond the 19th century neighborhoods, led me to the Roman suburbs. Following the notion of a paradox periphery, that was for good as a decade long, an ongoing theme and a topic of research in my artistic practice. This would be the case for an urban area, which in spite of its marginal position, does not have the typical aspect of a periphery. It also applies to an area that regardless of its central location, assumes a peripheral character due to structural or historic reasons.

I embarked on dérives21 and discovered more and more a big part of the outskirts of the Metropolis. These suburbs encircle the core of Rome and at the same time are confined by the Grande Raccordo Anulare, an orbital motorway of about 70 km.

My focus on these journeys lay on the variety of forms or signs such as architecture, billboards, graffitis, versatile objects (layout along the road) and street names. The latter appeared to me as a strange coincidence, as though I was trying to gain familiarly with Italian film history and the very same names of the deceased authors, directors and actors of the renewing of cinematographic Neorealism, started appearing in front of my camera lenses as street name signs. I would start frequenting the city’s commercial center to get a hold, in video rental stores, specialized shops and forums,

21 A dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, on which the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travellers, with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defined the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society”.

of the very movies since the 1940s. Parallel to that, I commenced a photographic series of Rome’s peripheral streets named after the protagonists of Italy’s cinematic history.

This photographic series is now recollected and published as “Cinecittà”. It is distinctively titled after Rome’s large film studios Cinecittà (cinema city). The studios were founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini, his son Vittorio, and his head of cinema Luigi Freddi under the slogan “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” (Cinema is the most powerful weapon).22 Mussolini himself inaugurated the studios on April 21, 1937. The studios were built partly as a location to shoot propaganda. The day of its grand opening, 21st April, was significant in that it was the day believed to be the founding of ancient Rome, thereby drawing a link between the greatness of ancient Rome and that of Italian Cinema.23 Today Cinecittà is the largest 10 film facility in Europe, located in the southern suburbs of11 Rome. Cinecittà’s iconic modernist front gate leads to an almost 100 acre complex that houses 22 stages and one giant outdoor water tank.

In Jean Luc Godard’s film “Le Mépris”, as a gesture of homage, Cinecittà plays a dominant role. A good part of the first half of the movie was captured in this very location and “Le Mépris” detects its allegoric counterpart in these studio structures, by reflecting the thematic subject of its decline—or more likely a paradigmatic shift in filmmaking. In an early scene that takes place in the Cinecittà studios, Godard showcases Louis Lumière’s pessimistic statement “The cinema is an invention

22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinecittà 23 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/italians/resources/Amiciprize/1996/ mussolini.html

without a future” in bold letters on the wall of a screening room.24 The present photographic series “Cinecittà” showcases how the film studio reaches out of its perimeter and leaves its virtual marks all over Rome, here in form of street name signs, and thereby interconnects the boundless city periphery. The photographs also thematize the cinematic space itself, where the making of a film usually takes place in different locations and separate studio spaces. The movie’s storyline is broken apart in many segments and is shot in an economical and practical related order of production rather than by the logic of the movie’s sequences. The end product, the completed movie, tells the story in a homogenic space, the one of its narration. It comes with the understanding of the cinematic space as a relationship between film, architecture, and the city: An actual deconstruct 12 and reconstruct of a city-space towards a virtual city 13 appearing in the movie.

The “Cinecittà” photographic series, depicting streets and places, virtually reconnects the reinventions of the cinema of the everyday life (Neorealismo) with the contemporary surroundings of the descendants of Neorealism’s main characters—and reflects a defining and recurring topic of the neorealist story line. According to Gilles Deleuze, a standard filmic narration is commonly motivated by a situation which urges an activity or as a consequence of it. Though the cinematography of Neorealism would introduce a more optic approach or more likely a condition of motion, the character appears as a seeing one and virtually becomes a remote spectator by itself.25 This is what compels Deleuze to describe 24 Roberto Donati, Le Mépris: Analysis of mise-en-scène, http:// www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/mepris_analysis/

Italian neorealism as a ‘visionary cinema’ in which characters have gained in an ability to see what they may have become excluded from in terms of action or reaction. He or she moves in vain, runs and rushes all for nothing, barely able to intervene in the plot and is extradited to a vision, haunted by it or yet pursuing the lost vision by her/himself.26 25

*** In Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita there is a scene where the journalist protagonist Marcello, waits together with a police commissioner for Steiner’s unsuspecting wife at a bus station. They are gathered and surrounded by a curious swarm of paparazzi27 photographers. Steiner is Marcello’s distinguished intellectual friend and a few hours before then, Steiner had committed suicide. The setting for the sequence is in Piazza Don Bosco with its modernistic architectonic scenery located in the vicinity of Cinecittà. Following the storyline of the movie, the scene is described as taking place in the EUR.28 25 Gilles Deleuze, Beyond the Movement-Image, in: Cinema II, The Time-Image, New York, 2005.

26 Ibid.

27 “Paparazzi” is an eponym originating in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita directed by Federico Fellini. One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named Paparazzo. Fellini said in his interview to Time magazine, “Paparazzo […] suggests to me a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging”. Paparazzi on the Prowl, Time Magazine, Friday, April 14, 1961.

28 EUR is a residential and business district in Rome, located south of the city centre. The area was originally chosen in 1930s as the site for the 1942 world’s fair which Benito Mussolini planned to open to celebrate twenty years of Fascism. The letters EUR standing for Esposizione Universale Roma.

In 2006 on a Christmas Eve Sunday morning (strange enough in context of the date), I attended a civil funeral service for Piergiorgio Welby. For many years Welby was paralyzed by muscular dystrophy. He died a few days before when a doctor turned off his life support machine at Welby’s request. That sparked a public outcry and a fierce debate about euthanasia, this was still an illegal practice in Italy of 2006. The commemoration was coincidentally held at the same piazza in front of the San Giovanni Bosco Basilica, where years before, in Fellini’s famed movie, Marcello broke the bad news to Steiner’s wife.

The Roman Catholic church denied a religious funeral inside the basilica, officially declaring that Welby had repeatedly and publicly affirmed his desire to end his own life, which would stand against the Catholic doctrine.

There we were standing as a huge dark vested crowd wearing ominous sunglasses in the bright morning light on Christmas Eve, surrounded by news program teams and broadcasting vans from all over the world. Real life, surprisingly enough, seems to have a bottomless pool filled with invention and power to overcome effortlessly, narrated fiction.

If one scratches the surface of Rome quickly, the city reveals its long cultural and sociological correlation with death. The baroque theme Memento mori (remember that you must die) seems to be an omnipresent momentum in Rome’s scenery. Reasoning over the ancient Roman temples and ruins reveals already plenty thereof, though there are less visible ones, as the origin of the ancient catacombs29 of Rome testimonies. In secluded and hidden places outside the city’s boundaries, ordinary Christians and their martyrs were buried into these catacombs, which are endless underground systems carved through and out of the soft

volcanic rock Early Christian art would emerge in graffiti technique and fresco style on these walls. Not only secret habits around death were practiced. The Etruscan30 for instance, preferred to build their settlements on hill tops with precipitous sides, chosen for purposes of defense.

These settlements were also known as acropolis (literally city on the edge). On a nearby hill in viewing distance, they would erect a necropolis (city of the death). From the rampant of the acropolis the Etruscans could peer over at any time from the city of life, across the dividing gorge, to the nearby city of their beloved deceased ones.

On the contrary, the ancient Roman necropolis weren’t erect on peaks of hill tops, though their dead cities were placed outside the city walls too. An ancient traveler would have passed tombs and graves, assembled to the left and right of the road, before the passenger would enter through the city’s gate.

12 The cities would eventually slop over their 13 fortifications and integrate the burial grounds into their city plan. The cemetery would become a stony and silent island studded with cypress trees and surrounded with tangents and newly erected neighborhoods. The business of death would be declared as a private one, hidden away from public eyes.

In the middle of Rome there is a striking31 example of the Memento mori theme, cited in an unexpected 29

29 A word of obscure origin, possibly deriving from a proper name, or else a corruption of the Latin phrase cata tumbas, “among the tombs”. The word referred originally only to the Roman catacombs.

30 A modern theory of etymology holds that the name of Rome is of Etruscan origin (and perhaps the city itself, though this cannot be proven), derived from rumon, “river”.

31 Marquis de Sade, who visited the crypt in the 18th century wrote: “I have never seen anything more striking”. Voyage d’Italie, Maurice Lever edition.

crypt under Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Via Veneto on, the corner of Piazza Barberini. In the 17th century a Cardinal ordered that the remains of thousands of Capuchin friars be exhumed and transferred from a monastery to this devoted space. The bones were arranged and fashioned as a decorative display along the walls, and soon the monks would themselves begin to bury their own dead in the same manner. In the evenings before retiring for the night they would use this very location for their meditation. There is still a sign in the crypt which reads “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be�.

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APPENDIX

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p. 15 (‘Cinema Roma’, Marta, Lazio) pp. 17–19 The Lumière brothers (Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas; October 19, 1862–April 10, 1954 and Louis Jean; October 5, 1864–June 6, 1948) were among the first filmmakers in history. They patented an improved cinematograph, which in contrast to Thomas Edison’s peepshow kinetoscope allowed simultaneous viewing by multiple parties. The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures on March 22, 1895. This first screening, took place in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of an audience of 200 people. On December 26, 1895, The Lumières gave their first paid public screening, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured 10 short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). The Lumières went on tour with the cinématographe in 1896, visiting Brussels (the first place a film was played outside Paris on the Galleries Saint-Hubert on March 1, 1896), Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City and Buenos Aires. The Lumière Brothers were not the only ones to claim the title of the first cinematographers. The scientific chronophotography devices developed by Eadweard Muybridge, ÉtienneJules Marey and Ottomar Anschütz were able to produce moving photographs in the 1880s. pp. 20–21 Marcel Proust (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust; July 10, 1871–November 18, 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century—and yet only a few directors dared to

adapted his writing for cinema. Proust is best known for his monumental exercise in voluntary memory À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1909 and 1927. In his opus magnum Proust seeks to reclaim the narrative of his past life, is permeated with episodes of involuntary memory, some ecstatically joyful, others full of the pain of loss and lost love. It is superficially about jealousy, obsession, perversion, solipsism, homosexuality, masturbation, sadomasochism, vanity, contempt, and monomania. More profoundly it is indeed about love, art, redemption, memory, and so forth […].1 Roger Shattuck elucidates an underlying principle in understanding Proust and the various themes present in his novel: “Thus the novel embodies and manifests the principle of intermittence: to live means to perceive different and 160 often conflicting aspects of reality. This iridescence never161 resolves itself completely into a unitive point of view.

Accordingly, it is possible to project out of the Search itself a series of putative and intermittent authors […]”.

Gilles Deleuze elucidates in a monograph in which he describes Proust’s narrator’s search as an apprenticeship to various sign systems—including the worldly—on the way to mastery and, ultimately, redemption through that most complex system, art. This extends another standard understanding of the Recherche as a Modernist experimental masterpiece in the Bildungsor Kunstlerroman tradition, but rewrites the journey of apprenticeship as a semiotic education.2 In 1962, the French film producer Nicole Stephane acquired the 1 Duncan McColl Chesney, www.freepatentsonline.com/article/ Post-Script/128671362.html 2 Ibid.

rights from Marcel Proust’s niece (Suzy Mante-Proust), to make a film version of À la recherche du temps perdu.

After some years and deliberation, Luchino Visconti was decided upon as an appropriate director for the project. In collaboration with his long-time co-author Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Visconti began his own treatment of the novel. In the meantime Visconti made Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971). By late 1970 Visconti was able to devote his time to the Proust project. With his long-time art director Mario Garbuglia (Rocco e suoi fratelli and Il Gattopardo) and costume designer Piero Tosi (Senso, Il Gattopardo), he made extensive visits to Paris and to Proust country (mainly Normandy) to begin planning the film. The cast slated for the film was to include Alain Delon as the Narrator, Marlon Brando as Charlus, Helmut Berger as Morel, and Silvana Mangano as the Duchesse de Guermantes. It was even rumored that 162 Greta Garbo would come out of retirement for the role of 163 the Queen of Naples. The project was postponed in 1971 when Stephane proved short of cash for the increasingly ambitious film (approaching 4 hours in projected length).

Visconti, perhaps sensing acutely his own mortality after Morte a Venezia, could not be stalled, and in 1972 began work on Ludwig (1974). As a life-long reader of Proust, Visconti had determined to realize the project, though admitting to Cecchi d’Amico that “this will be my last film”.3 Illness during and subsequent to the filming of Ludwig kept Visconti from pursuing the issue. He died before he could ever get back to Proust. The 2003 film of Italian writer-director Fabio Carpi (1925) Le intermittenze del cuore (The Intermittencies of the Heart) depicts a film director working on a movie about Proust’s life. The 3 Duncan McColl Chesney, www.freepatentsonline.com/article/ Post-Script/128671362.html

title of the film ingeniously echoes the essence and soul of Proust’s text: “For the intermittences of the heart are closely linked to the troubles of memory. Without doubt, it is the existence of our body, to us akin to a jar in which our spiritual nature is enclosed, that leads us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession”. pp. 22–25 Charlie Chaplin (Charles Spencer Chaplin; April 16, 1889—December 25, 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame during the era of silent film. Chaplin became a worldwide icon through his screen persona the Tramp and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists, which gave him complete control over his films. His first feature-length was The Kid (1921), followed by A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928). He refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. Chaplin became increasingly political, and his next film, The Great Dictator (1940), satirised Adolf Hitler. The 1940s were a decade marked with controversy for Chaplin, and his popularity declined rapidly. He was accused of communist sympathies, while his involvement in a paternity suit and marriages to much younger women caused scandal. An FBI investigation was opened, and Chaplin was forced to leave the United States and settle in Switzerland. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, edited, starred in, and composed the music for most of his films.

He was a perfectionist, and his financial independence

enabled him to spend years on the development and production of a picture. His films are characterised by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp’s struggles against adversity. Many contain social and political themes, as well as autobiographical elements.

In 1972, as part of a renewed appreciation for his work, Chaplin received an Honorary Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century”. pp. 26–27 Mario Bonnard (December 24, 1889—March 22, 1965) began his cinematic career as an actor becoming a popular romantic lead in numerous silent films made before World War I. This kind of dandy all’italiana type inspired Ettore Petrolini’s latin-lover stage character Gastonia, which influenced in turn the commedia all’italiana genre. In 1917 he ventured into film directing for the first time. In Bonnard’s Mentre il pubblico ride (While the audience laughs, 1919) Petrolini—also playwright of the film—had his first film performance as actor. Before the arrival of sound films Bonnard worked and directed for a period in Germany and co-directed with Luis Trenker Der Sohn der weißen Berge (The Son of the White Mountain, 1930) a German mystery romance film. It was part of the popular series of Mountain films of the era (Luis Trenker’s main theme as director and actor was the idealization of peoples connection with their homeland and pointing out the decadence of city life.

This loosely played into the hands of Nazi propagandists.

Trenker refused to allow his work to be subverted as such and eventually moved to Rome in 1940, to avoid further governmental pressure. However his impersonation of a hungry, downtrodden immigrant in depression era New York in The Prodigal Son, 1934, was regarded as one of

the groundbreaking scenes for future Italian neorealism cinema). Back in Italy in 1932, Bonnard became a prolific director working with the major stars of the time. The comedy Il feroce Saladino (The Ferocious Saladin, 1937), was the most popular of his films of the 1930s— Alberto Sordi’s appearance as extra in a lion-costume was at once one of his first performances in front of the camera. Il feroce Saladino was one of the early films made at Cinecittà studios in Rome such as Scipione l’africano (see entry Isa Miranda). During World War II Bonnard continued to work. Avanti, c’è posto (Before the Postman, 1942) and Campo de’ fiori (The Peddler and the Lady, 1943) were both realized at the Cinecittà studios. The romantic comedy Avanti, c’è posto shows Cesare Zavattini signature as screenwriter (co-playwright with Aldo Fabrizi and Federico Fellini) and anticipates the emerging Italian neorealism—yet far from the vehemence 162 of Roma città aperta (Rossellini, 1945) or the accusatory163 elements of Sciuscià (De Sica, 1946). Both films lifted Aldo Fabrizi on a national level of a popular and admired actor, which he already was as an acclaimed Roman stage actor. In the post World War II period his films, ranging from comedies to period dramas enjoyed much success.

However, today he’s no longer well known. One of his last film was Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959). He had to leave production early due to an illness, the film had to be completed by Sergio Leone. pp. 28–31 Anton Giulio Bragaglia (February 11, 1890–July 15, 1960) was a pioneer in Italian Futurist photography and Futurist cinema. A versatile and intellectual artist with wide interests, he wrote about film, theatre, and dance. In 1911 he published the treatise Fotodinamismo and began lecturing on the concept. In the same year he became the

chief editor of the art and theater newspaper L’Artista.

He published two Futurist manifestos, Fotodinamica futurista (1912) and Manifesto del cinema futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, 1916). Bragaglia founded the avant garde magazine Cronache di Attualità in 1916, which examined politics, music, theater and art from a Futurist standpoint. In the same year he founded the film studio Novissima-Film. In 1917 Bragaglia produced two visionary Futurist films Thaïs and Il mio cadavere. pp. 32, 33 & 35 Buster Keaton (Joseph Frank Keaton; October 4, 1895–February 1, 1966) was an American actor, director, producer, writer, and stunt performer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname The Great Stone Face. He 164 worked without interruption on a series of films that 165 make him, arguably, the greatest actor–director in the history of the movies from 1920 to 1929. His career declined afterward with a dispiriting loss of his artistic independence when he was hired by MGM, which resulted in a crippling alcoholism that ruined his family life. He recovered in the 1940s, and revived his career to a degree as an honored comic performer for the rest of his life. pp. 37–39 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (December 23, 1896– July 26, 1957) was an Italian writer and the last Prince of Lampedusa. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo (first published posthumously in 1958, translated as The Leopard), which is set in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn and solitary man, he spent a great deal of his time reading and

meditating, and used to say of himself, “I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people”. Il Gattopardo follows the family of its title character, Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, through the events of the Risorgimento.

Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the disintegrating Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. The title is rendered in English as The Leopard, but the Italian word gattopardo refers to the American ocelot or to the African serval. Il Gattopardo may be a reference to a wildcat that was hunted to extinction in Italy in the mid-19th century—just as Don Fabrizio was dryly contemplating the indolence and decline of the Sicilian aristocracy. In 1963 Il Gattopardo was made into a film, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, and won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. pp. 41–45 Totò (Prince Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi De Curtis di Bisanzio; February 15, 1898–April 15, 1967), best known by his stage name Totò born simply as Antonio De Curtis, and nicknamed il Principe della risata (the Prince of laughter), was an Italian comedian, film and theatre actor, writer, singer and songwriter. While he first gained his popularity as a comic actor, his dramatic roles, poetry, and songs are all deemed to be outstanding; his style and a number of his recurring jokes and gestures have become universally

known memes in Italy. Writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has thus commented on the importance of Totò in Italian culture: “[…] in this globalized world where it seems that everyone sees the same movies and eats the same food, there are still unbridgeable divisions between cultures. How can two people ever come to understand each other when one of them is ignorant of Totò?”.

And Mario Monicelli who directed some of the most appreciated of Totò‘s movies, thus described his artistic value: “With Totò, we got it all wrong. He was a genius, not just a grandiose actor. And we constrained him, reduced him, forced him into a common human being, and thus clipped his wings”. As a comic actor, Totò was classified as an heir of the Commedia dell’arte tradition, and was compared to such figures as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Totò died at the age of 69 in Rome. Due to overwhelming demand there were no fewer than three funeral services: the first in Rome, a second in his birth city of Naples—and a few days later, in a third one by the local Camorra boss, an empty casket was carried along the packed streets of the popular Rione Sanità quarter where he was born. pp. 46, 47 & 49 Curzio Malaparte (Kurt Erich Suckert; June 9, 1898– July 19, 1957). “Malaparte was a playwright, film-maker and novelist, the author of a treatise on the technique of the coup d’état and a slightly shady diplomat”.4 But he saw himself above all as a writer creating a new type of fiction, a species of wilfully unreliable reportage in which the most gruesome episodes are recounted with terrifying gaiety. His chosen surname, which he used from 1925, 4 www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/01/bad-bone-johngray-italian-fascist-curzio-malapartes-lost-masterpiece

means ‘evil/wrong side’ and is a play on Napoleon’s family name ‘Bonaparte’ which means, in Italian, ‘good side’. Malaparte fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor, and in 1922 took part in Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome. In 1924, he founded the Roman periodical La Conquista dello Stato (The Conquest of the State, a title that would inspire Ramiro Ledesma Ramos’ La Conquista del Estado, Ramiro Ledesma was one of the key figures of Francoist propaganda). As a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he founded several periodicals and contributed essays and articles to others, as well as writing numerous books, starting from the early 1920s, and directing two metropolitan newspapers. Malaparte was being stripped of his National Fascist Party membership and sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari. Mussolini’s 164 regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and165 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome’s jail Regina Coeli.

During that time (1938–41) he built a house, known as the Casa Malaparte (architect, Adalberto Libera), on Capo Massullo, on the Isle of Capri. It was later used as a location in Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Le Mépris. “His writings are full of toxic stereotypes, sexist, racist and homophobic. Yet it is impossible to be sure whether these displays of prejudice were sincere, or rather—as he seems at times to intimate—whether they serve as cryptic expressions of solidarity with the people who are being stereotyped. He has an Allied officer in The Skin ask the narrator, ‘with an urbanely ironical air: How much truth there is in all that you relate in Kaputt?’ I suspect that Malaparte, a self-mocking provocateur whose life was a succession of performances, did not know the answer.

Paradoxically, it may have been his lack of any coherent self that enabled him to portray the chaos of wartime

Europe with such authenticity”.5 La pelle (The Skin, 1981) is an Italian war film directed by Liliana Cavani (1933–) and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster. “While Malaparte’s novel La Pelle (The Skin, 1949) focused largely on the dynamics of American exploitation, Cavani’s film lends more time and focus to the women being exploited, constructing three disparate female characters, varyingly imprisoned by the demands of their given circumstances. Princess Consuelo (Claudia Cardinale) dines and accompanies Malaparte on his trips around the country, but is sexually autonomous from him, both throughout the film via sexual escapades and, in the dénouement, with a volcano erupting nearby, by having sex with an unnamed young man. Yet, she’s only afforded such sexual freedom, ultimately, once a natural disaster has broken the constraints marital order and fidelity. As something of the converse to Consuelo’s 166 more stereotypically feminine beauty, Deborah Wyatt 167 (Alexandra King), a colonel in the American Air Force, is quick-witted and verbally spares with Malaparte as she arrives in Naples. In a shocking scene late in the film, Wyatt is abducted and raped by a group of soldiers as the erupting volcano turns Naples into chaos. Cavani utilizes both womens’ bodies as contrasting figures of sexuality, but since each of them is ultimately defined by a sexual act (one of choice, one of resistance), each of their bodies comes to stand in microcosm for Italy’s symbolical body politic”.6

5 www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/01/bad-bone-johngray-italian-fascist-curzio-malapartes-lost-masterpiece 6 http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/the-skin

pp. 50–53 Eduardo De Filippo (May 24, 1900–October 31, 1984) was an Italian actor, playwright, screenwriter, author and poet, best known for his Neapolitan works Filumena Marturano and Napoli Milionaria. He began acting at the age of five and in 1932 formed a theater company with his brother Peppino and sister Titina, called Compagnia del Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo. De Filippo starred in De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli with Totò and Sophia Loren in 1954. In 1973 a production of his Sabato, domenica e lunedi (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) won the London drama critics’ award. His translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest into Neapolitan was published in 1982. De Filippo was appointed life senator of the Italian Republic in 1981, and died three years later. pp. 55–57 Gino Cervi (May 3, 1901–January 3, 1974) was an Italian actor. Cervi was best known for his role of Giuseppe Bottazzi (Peppone), the Communist mayor in the Don Camillo movies of the 1950s and the 1960s. He shared great complicity and friendship with co-star Fernandel during the 15 years playing their respective roles in Don Camillo movies. At the end of his career, he played Commissioner Maigret for six years in the Italian version, which ended with a movie Maigret a Pigalle (Mario Landi, 1966), produced by his son Antonio Cervi. pp. 58–61 Vittorio De Sica (July 7, 1901–November 13, 1974) was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the Neorealist movement. Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià (1946) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) were awarded honorary Oscars, while Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963)

and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1970) won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià—the first foreign film to be so recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—and Ladri di biciclette helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Oscar.

These two films generally are considered part of the canon of classic cinema. Ladri di biciclette was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history. In 1935, De Sica met Cesare Zavattini (screenwriter and one of the first theorists of the Neorealist movement), it was the beginning of a partnership that produced some twenty films, including the mentioned masterpieces of Italian neorealism cinema. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) won the Palme d’Or at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival —the screenplay was also co-written by Zavattini, based on his novel Totò il Buono. The film, told as a neorealist fable, explains the lives of a poverty-stricken group in post-war Milan, Italy. p. 63 Fernandel (Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin; May 8, 1903–February 26, 1971) was a French actor and singer. He was a comedy star who first gained popularity in French vaudeville, operettas, and music-hall revues. His stage name originated from his marriage to Henriette Manse, the sister of his best friend and frequent cinematic collaborator Jean Manse. So attentive was he to his wife that his mother-in-law amusingly referred to him as Fernand d’elle (her Fernand). In 1930, Fernandel appeared in his first motion picture and for more than forty years he would be France’s top comedian actor. He was perhaps best-loved for his portrayal of the irascible Italian village priest at war with the town’s Communist

mayor Peppone—played by actor Gino Cervi—in the Don Camillo series of motion pictures. pp. 64–67 Aldo Fabrizi (November 1, 1905–April 2, 1990) was an Italian actor, director, screenwriter and comedian—Italy’s most popular variety performer at his time. Fabrizi is probably best known for the role of the heroic priest in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and as partner of Totò in a number of successful comedies. Together with Anna Magnani and Alberto Sordi maybe one of the most pronounced representatives (characters) of Roman cinema. When Federico Fellini was asked to interview Fabrizi for CineMagazzino, he established such immediate personal rapport with Fabrizi that they collaborated professionally.

Specializing in humorous monologues, Fabrizi 166 commissioned material from his young protégé (Fellini).167 pp. 68–73 Roberto Rossellini (Roberto Gastone Zeffiro Rossellini; May 8, 1906–June 3, 1977) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was an important protagonist of the Italian neorealist cinema (cinema neorealista), contributing to the movement films such as Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945). Some authors describe the first part of his career as a sequence of trilogies. His first feature film, La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941) was sponsored by the audiovisual propaganda centre of Navy Department and is the first work in Rossellini’s ‘Fascist Trilogy’, together with Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942) and L’uomo dalla croce (The Man with a Cross, 1943). To this period belongs his friendship and cooperation with Federico Fellini and Aldo Fabrizi. The Fascist regime collapsed in 1943 and just two months

after the liberation of Rome (4 June 1944), Rossellini was already preparing the anti-fascist Roma città aperta.

Fellini assisted on the script and Fabrizi played the role of the priest, while Rossellini self-produced. Most of the money came from credits and loans, and film had to be found on the black market. Rossellini had started now his so-called ‘Neorealistic Trilogy’, the second title of which was Paisà (Paisan, 1946), produced with nonprofessional actors, and the third, Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1948), sponsored by a French producer and filmed in Berlin’s French sector. Martin Scorsese notes in his documentary My Voyage to Italy (the title itself a take on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, 1954) that in contrast to directors who often become more restrained and more conservative stylistically as their careers advance, Rossellini became more and more unconventional and was constantly experimenting with 168 new styles and technical challenges.

169 pp. 75–77 Luchino Visconti (Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo; November 2, 1906–March 17, 1976) was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He began his filmmaking career as an assistant director on Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935). It is an early example of the casting of non-professional actors and on-location shooting—both of which would influence the Italian neorealism. Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the ‘salotto’ of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, who was then the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts). Here he presumably also met Federico Fellini. With others he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) an unofficial adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and is generally thought to be the

first neorealist film. Italian neorealism came about as World War II ended and Benito Mussolini’s government fell, causing the Italian film industry to lose its centre.

Neorealism was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy. Its films presented contemporary stories and ideas and were often shot in streets as the Cinecittà film studios had been damaged significantly during the war. Its impact has been enormous not only on Italian film but also on French La Nouvelle Vague cinema.

Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, although he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, shot in colour. In this film, Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from Neorealism. Visconti returned to Neorealism once more with Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). The story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability. pp. 78–81 Alberto Moravia (Alberto Pincherle; November 28, 1907–September 26, 1990) was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Moravia is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929) and for the anti-fascist novel Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951), the basis for the film Il conformista (1970) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his adapted for the cinema are Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon or Contempt, 1954), filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963); La noia (Boredom, 1960), filmed with that title

by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas (1964) and La ciociara (Two Women, 1957), filmed by Vittorio de Sica with that title. The emergence of Neorealism during the Fascist years was

sporadic. Moravia wrote perhaps the first representative work in Gli indifferenti (1929). Moravia’s writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie. It was rooted in the tradition of nineteenth-century narrative, underpinned by high social and cultural awareness. In his world, where inherited social, religious and moral beliefs were no longer acceptable, he considered sex and money the only criteria for judging social and human reality. pp. 83–85 Anna Magnani (March 7, 1908–September 26, 1973) was an Italian stage and film actress. She became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of ‘lower-class women’ in such films as Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945), L’amore (1948), Bellissima (1951) and Mamma Roma (1962). Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo. For which movie she received an Oscar for Best Actress for the portrayal of a Sicilian widow, along with four other international awards in 1955. She was referred to as La Lupa a ‘living she-wolf symbol’ of the cinema. Director Roberto Rossellini called her “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse”. As early as 1950 Life magazine had already stated that Magnani was “one of the most impressive actresses since Greta Garbo”. Federico Fellini staged Magnani in his Roma (1972) were Magnani had her final film role—appearing as herself.

cinema. Success came with Max Ophüls’ film La Signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman, 1934) in which she played Gaby Doriot, a famous film star and adventuress with whom men cannot help falling in love. Having brought several of them to their ruin, she slits her wrists. This performance brought in its wake several film offers and a Hollywood contract with Paramount Pictures. There, billed as the ‘Italian Marlene Dietrich’. Miranda played Velia, a Roman woman, in Scipione l’africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal, 1937). The film funded

by Benito Mussolini and was released in 1937, serving as propaganda for the fascist ambitions to invade North Africa. It focuses on Publius Cornelius Scipio (Scipio Africanus) from the time of his election as dictator until his defeat of Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. A division of the Italian army was used as extras in the film, shortly before being transferred to duty in the 168 Spanish Civil War. In 1949, she starred in René Clément’s 169 Le mura di Malapaga (The Walls of Malapaga), which won an Academy Award for the most outstanding foreign language film of 1950. A notable film appearance includes Siamo donne (We, the Women, 1953) an anthology film, where Miranda shares the screen with three other film legends. The movie is directed by Rossellini and Visconti among others. The segments focus upon alleged events in the private lives of the film actresses Ingrid Bergman, Anna Magnani, Isa Miranda and Alida Valli. Miranda died in Rome in 1982, three days after her 73rd birthday.

pp. 87–89 Isa Miranda (Ines Isabella Sampietro; July 5, 1909–July 8, 1982) was an Italian actress with an international film career. She reached international popularity in the 1930s, especially in France, Germany and Austria, and became the only international movie star produced by the fascist

pp. 90–93 Ennio Flaiano (March 5, 1910–November 20, 1972) was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, and drama critic. Best known for his work with Federico Fellini, Flaiano co-wrote ten screenplays with the Italian director, including La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8½.

In 1947, he won the Strega Prize for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill). Set in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion (1935–36). This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa. A movie adaptation with the same title, directed by Giuliano Montaldo and starred by Nicolas Cage, was released in 1989. Flaiano’s name is indissolubly tied to Rome, a city he loved and hated, as he was a caustic witness to its urban evolutions and debacles, its vices and its virtues. In La Solitudine del Satiro (The Via Veneto Papers, 1973), Flaiano left numerous passages relating to his Rome. pp. 95–97 Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known 170 as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his 171 whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Lo straniero (The Stranger) is a 1967 film by Italian film director Luchino Visconti, based on Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger, with Marcello Mastroianni. In January 1960, at the age of forty-six, Camus was killed in a car accident in the Luberon area in southern France. The incomplete manuscript of Le Premier Homme (The First Man), the autobiographical novel Camus was working on at the time of his death, was found in the mud at the accident site. Camus’ daughter, Catherine Camus, later transcribed the handwritten manuscript to type press, and published the book in 1994. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics agreed with his view, even in its unfinished state. The largely cited physical intensity and uninhibited psychology of boyhood is distinguishing

itself from the reservedness of Camus’ other novels. In 2011 the French-Italian drama film Le Premier Homme, directed by Gianni Amelio, is based on the posthumously published novel. pp. 98–101 Federico Fellini (January 20, 1920–October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness, or as Fellini himself puts into words “The visionary is the only true realist. Everyone lives in his fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that”. Fellini is recognized as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked, in polls such as Cahiers du cinéma and Sight & Sound, as some of the greatest films of all time. In a career spanning almost fifty years, Fellini won the Palme d’Or (Cannes) for La Dolce Vita, was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and directed four motion pictures that won Oscars in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. He was awarded an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Annual Academy Awards in 1993. pp. 102–103 Alberto Sordi (June 15, 1920–February 24, 2003) was an Italian actor and film director. In a career that spanned seven decades, Sordi established himself as an icon of Italian cinema with his representative skills at both comedy and light drama, he acted in more than 200 movies. His career began in the late 1930s with bit parts and secondary characters in wartime movies (Scipione l’africano or Il feroce Saladino, both 1937). After the war he began working as a dubber for the Italian versions of Laurel and Hardy shorts, voicing Oliver Hardy. Early roles included Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White

Sheik, 1952), Fellini’s I vitelloni (lit. ‘The Bullocks’, 1953), a movie about young slackers, in which he plays a weak, effeminate immature loafer and a starring role in Lo scapolo (The Bachelor, 1956) playing a single man trying to find love. In 1959 he appeared in Monicelli’s The Great War, considered by many critics and film historians to be one of the best Italian comedies. The Hollywood Foreign Press recognized his abilities when he was awarded a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Il diavolo, (To Bed or Not to Bed, 1963). Sordi also succeeded in dramatic roles, most notably in Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man, 1977) in which he portrays an elderly civil servant whose son is killed in an armed robbery, and sets out to exact revenge. Sordi died shortly before his eighty-third birthday following a heart attack in 2003. A crowd in excess of a million gathered to pay their last respects at his funeral by the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the largest of such event ever attended in Rome, second only to that of Pope John Paul II who died two years later. p. 105 Nino Manfredi (Saturnino Manfredi; March 22, 1921–June 4, 2004) was one of the most prominent Italian actors in the Commedia all’italiana genre. He was also a film and stage director, a screenwriter, a playwright, a comedian, a singer, an author, a radio and television presenter and a voice actor. Typically Manfredi was playing losers, marginalised, working-class characters yet “in possession of their dignity, morality, and underlying optimism”,7 he was referred to as “one of the few truly complete actors in Italian cinema”.8 During his career he won several awards, 7

Enrico Lancia

8 Ibid.

including the Prix de la première oeuvre (Best First Work Award) at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival for his debut as feature film director, Per grazia ricevuta (Between Miracles), he not only acted in the movie but also co-wrote the screenplay for it. Manfredi’s last role was Galapago, an almost mute stranger with no memory in Miguel Hermoso’s Spanish drama film La luz prodigiosa (The End of a Mystery, 2003). A few months after the release of the film, he was struck by a cerebral infarction in his home in Rome, and died a year after. In 2007 an astroid ‘73453 Ninomanfredi’ was named after him. pp. 107–111 Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 5, 1922–November 2, 1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual.

Pasolini also distinguished himself as an actor, journalist, philosopher, novelist, playwright, painter 170 and political figure, whose political vision—based 171 on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism and Marxism—foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism. He remains a controversial personality in Italy to this day due to his blunt style and the focus of some of his works on taboo sexual matters. Pasolini’s work often engendered disapproval perhaps primarily because of his frequent focus on sexual behavior, and the contrast between what he presented and what was publicly sanctioned.

While Pasolini’s poetry often dealt with his gay love interests, yet his interest in and use of Italian dialects is from great significance. He depicted certain corners of the contemporary reality as few other poets could do. Pasolini also developed a philosophy of language mainly related to his studies on cinema. These studies can be considered as the foundation of his artistic point of view: he believed that the language—such as English,

Italian, dialect or other—is a rigid system in which human thought is trapped. He also thought that the cinema is the ‘written’ language of reality which, like any other written language, enables to see things from the point of view of truth. Pasolini was particularly concerned about the class of the subproletariat, which he portrayed in Accattone (his first film as director, 1961), and to which he felt both humanly and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the pre-industrial popular culture was rapidly vanishing, a process that he named la scomparsa delle lucciole (lit. “the disappearance of glow-worms”). Pasolini’s stance finds its roots in the belief that a Copernican change was taking place in the Italian society and the world. Linked to that very idea, Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society since the mid 1960s to the 172 early 1970s. As he saw it, the society of consumerism 173 (neocapitalism) and the ‘new fascism’ had thus expanded an alienation/homogenization and centralization that the former ‘clerical-fascism’ had not managed to achieve, so bringing about an anthropological change. In 1963, Pasolini met the great love of his life, Ninetto Davoli, a skinny kid, “a madman, with soft and merry eyes, dressed like the Beatles … an innocent barbarian,” as he wrote in a poem about their first encounter. Pasolini made Ninetto, who turned out to have real talent as a comic actor, the star of his 1966 film Uccelaci Uccelini (The Hawks and the Sparrows), a medieval fable about religion, opposite the great Italian character actor Totò.

For a few years Ninetto shared Pasolini’s home and was his constant companion, as well as appearing in six more of his films. Even after Ninetto left Pasolini’s home their deep friendship continued. And it was Ninetto who went to Ostia to identify the horribly battered corpse—for the

Carabinieri—as that of his mentor and friend. It was a murder that, four decades later, still remains a mystery.

Pasolini had died, as though in a scene from one of his films. “It is only at the point of death,” Pasolini had said in 1967, “that our life, to that point ambiguous, undecipherable, suspended—acquires a meaning”. His films won numerous awards i.a. at the Berlin International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival. pp. 113–115 Ugo Tognazzi (March 23, 1922–October 27, 1990) was an Italian film, TV, and theatre actor, director, and screenwriter. Tognazzi became one of the most renowned characters of the Commedia all’Italiana (Italian comedy).

He worked with all the main directors of Italian cinema, including Mario Monicelli, Marco Ferreri, Dino Risi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ettore Scola and others. According to film critic G.P. Brunetta, Tognazzi is considered to be one of the ‘mostri’ (monsters) of Commedia all’italiana alongside Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman e Nino Manfredi, a quartet to which also Marcello Mastroianni needs to be added for his engagement during the 1960s.

Tognazzi won the Best Actor Award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival for La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci).

Tognazzi died of brain hemorrhage in Rome in 1990, although rumors persist to this day that his chronic depression led to suicide. p. 117 Vittorio Gassman (Vittorio Gassmann; September 1, 1922–June 29, 2000) was an Italian theatre and film actor, as well as director, popularly know as Il Mattatore (the nickname relates to his acting in the television series

Il Mattatore ‘Spotlight Chaser’). It was with Luchino Visconti’s company that Gassman achieved his mature success. He is considered one of the greatest Italian actors and is commonly recalled as a versatile, magnetic interpreter, whose long career includes both important productions as well as dozens of divertissements (one of the ‘mostri’ of Commedia all’italiana, see Tognazzi). I mostri (also known as Opiate ‘67 or, in a cut version, 15 from Rome) is a 1963 Commedia all’italiana film shot in episodes and directed by Dino Risi. The themes of the short stories are intended to offer a clear picture of the habits, vices, of cheating and taste typical of the majority of Italians in the Sixties. The film was a huge success in Italy. It was censored in Spain. In 1977 an Academy Award nominee sequel was filmed, entitled I nuovi mostri (Viva Italia!). In the 1990s Gassman took part in the popular Rai 3 TV show Tunnel in which he very formally and ‘seriously’ recited documents such as utility bills, yellow pages, washing instructions for a wool sweater or cookies ingredients. pp. 119–121 Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter or Charlton John Carter; October 4, 1923–April 5, 2008) was an American actor and outspoken political activist (from a supporter of civil rights in the 1960s, to his most controversial role in politics as the five-term president of the National Rifle Association, 1998–2003). Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career, but who is remembered especially for his monumental portrayals of Moses and Ben-Hur. According to a Heston filmography the film My Father, Rua Alguem 5555 (directed by Egidio Eronico, 2003) is listed as his last film in which he played the father, Josef Mengele (notorious member of the team of doctors, in Auschwitz

concentration camp, responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for performing deadly human experiments on prisoners). pp. 123–125 Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923–September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. With twenty years of age, Calvino refused military service—in fascist Italy—and joined the Resistenza partigiana (Italian resistance movement). Using the battlename of Santiago, Calvino became member of the partisan group Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group and, for twenty months, endured the fighting in the Maritime Alps until the end of the Italian Civil War and the end of Nazi occupation of Italy during World War II on April 25, 1945. Calvino’s best known works include I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors trilogy, 172 1952–1959) and the novel Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities, 173 1972). In 1947 Calvino started working as a journalist for the official Communist daily, L’Unità, and the newborn Communist political magazine, Rinascita. Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party’s headoffices in Rome. He also worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly. His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders) written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947. The novel inaugurated Calvino’s neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Cesare Pavese praised the young writer as a “squirrel of the pen” who “climbed into the trees, more for fun than fear, to observe partisan life as a fable of the forest”. Calvino was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. A crater on the planet Mercury, Calvino, and a main belt asteroid, 22370 Italocalvino, are

also named after him. Calvino co-wrote the screenplay segment of Renzo e Luciano of Boccaccio ’70—an 1962 Italian anthology film of four episodes, each by one of the four directors (Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica). The anthology’s segments are all about a different aspect of morality and love in modern times. Held in the style of Giovanni Boccaccio (a Renaissance humanist) who is particularly noted for his realistic dialogue which differed from that of his contemporaries, medieval writers who usually followed formulaic models for character and plot. pp. 126–129 Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni; September 28, 1924–December 19, 1996) was an Italian film actor. His prominent films include: La Dolce Vita; 8½; La Notte; Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce 174 Italian Style). His honours included British Film Academy 175 Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival (1970 & 1987), two Golden Globe Awards (1961, 1965) and three Venice Film Festival awards (1989, 1990 & 1993).

Mastroianni made his screen debut as an uncredited extra in Marionette (1939) when he was fourteen. Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring alongside Totò and Vittorio Gassman in I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958, directed

by Mario Monicelli, and considered to be among the masterpieces of Italian cinema); and in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opposite Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome’s high society. Mastroianni followed La Dolce Vita with another signature role, in 8½ (1963) one of Fellini’s masterpiece.

Here the bond between actor and director became even more intimate. Dressed in the director’s dressmark, black

suit and black Stetson, Mastroianni became Fellini’s alter ego in this intensely autobiographical film of a director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a movie.

Mastroianni died in 1996, the Trevi Fountain in Rome, associated with his role in La Dolce Vita, was symbolically turned off and draped in black as a tribute. pp. 131–133 Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926– August 5, 1962) was an American actress and model.

She was a top-billed actress for only a decade, her films grossed $200 million by the time of her unexpected death in 1962. She continues to be considered a major popular culture icon. Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and in orphanage and married at the age of sixteen. While working in a factory in 1944 as part of the war effort, she was introduced to a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pinup modeling career. By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars, with leading roles in three films: the noir Niagara, which focused on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a ‘dumb blonde’. Although she played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, she was disappointed at being typecast and underpaid by the studio. She dedicated 1955 to building her company (Monroe founded a film production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions ‘MMP’, in late 1954) and began studying method acting at the Actors Studio. Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary in late 1955.

After a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (1956) and acting in the first independent production

of MMP, The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for Some Like It Hot (1959). p. 135 Sergio Leone (January 3, 1929–April 30, 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, credited as the inventor of the ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre. Leone’s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme closeup shots with lengthy long shots. Working in Italian cinematography, he began as an assistant to Vittorio de Sica during the movie Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). Leone began writing screenplays during the 1950s. He also worked as an assistant director on several large-scale international productions shot at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, notably Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959), financially backed by the American studios. When director Mario Bonnard fell ill during the production of the 1959 Italian epic Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1959), Leone was asked to step in and complete the film. As a result, when the time came to make his solo directorial debut with Il Colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes, 1961), Leone was well equipped to produce low-budget films which looked like larger-budget Hollywood movies. In the mid1960s, historical epics fell out of favor with audiences, but Leone had shifted his attention to a subgenre which came to be known as the ‘Spaghetti Western’, owing its origin to the American Western. His film Per un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) was based upon Akira Kurosawa’s Edo-era samurai adventure Yojimbo (1961). Leone’s film elicited a legal challenge from the Japanese director, though Kurosawa’s film was in turn probably based on the 1929 Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest. Per un Pugno di Dollari is also notable for establishing Clint Eastwood as a star. Until that time

Eastwood had been an American television actor with few credited film roles. Leone’s next two films—Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966)—completed what has come to be known as the ‘Man with No Name trilogy’ (or the ‘Dollars trilogy’), with each film being more financially successful and more technically accomplished than its predecessor. The films featured innovative music scores by Ennio Morricone, who worked closely with Leone in devising the themes.

Leone was invited to the United States in 1967 to direct C’Era una Volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) for Paramount Pictures. The film was shot mostly in Almería, Spain and Cinecittà in Rome. It was also briefly shot in Monument Valley, Utah. The film emerged as a long, violent, dreamlike meditation upon the mythology of the American Old West, with many stylistic references 174 to iconic western films. Audience tension is maintained 175 throughout this nearly three-hour film by concealing both the hero’s identity and his unpredictable motivation until the final predictable shootout scene. Perhaps unsurpassed as a retribution drama, the film’s script was written by Leone and his longtime friend and collaborator Sergio Donati, from a story by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento. Before its release, however, it was ruthlessly edited by Paramount. pp. 136–137 Elio Petri (January 29, 1929–November 10, 1982) was an Italian film critic, director and screenwriter. In 1949 he started his career as a journalist and film critic (for L’Unità and Gioventù nuova), while forming and shaping his own personal concept and ideas of cinema. Petri remained in the ‘classic’ framework of movie production, yet his original ideas and artistic talent became visible by his

themes and in expressing his personal stile. It made him also on an international level famous. Petri directed, and co-authored with Tonino Guerra, Un tranquillo posto di campagna (A Quiet Place in the Country, 1968), it focuses on solitude and the artist’s romantic agony. The film won a Silver Bear award at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival. The big success came with Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970). It is part of the ‘Neuroses trilogy’ and tells the story of a top police officer (Gian Maria Volontè) who kills his mistress, and then tests whether the police would charge him for this crime. The film was highly regarded in its own time, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and among others the Palme D’Or at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. The other chapter of the ‘Neuroses trilogy’ La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes 176 to Heaven, again with Gian Maria Volontè as leading 177 actor, 1971) depicts the working class and its struggles and difficulties. The film shared the Palme D’Or with Il Caso Mattei (directed by Francesco Rosi and also with Gian Maria Volontè as leading actor) at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. The work on a last film Chi illumina la grande notte, was well advanced: the takes scheduled for September 1982, and Marcello Mastroianni was to play the leading role, though Petri died of cancer in November 1982. pp. 138–139 Bud Spencer (Carlo Pedersoli; October 31, 1929–June 27, 2016) was an Italian actor, professional swimmer and water polo player—as a professional swimmer Pedersoli was the first Italian to swim the 100 m freestyle in less than one minute on 19 September 1950. As a water polo player, he won the Italian Championship in 1954 with

S.S. Lazio and the gold medal at 1955 Mediterranean Games in Barcelona with the Italian national team.

Pedersoli’s first film role was in Quel fantasma di mio marito, an Italian comedy shot in 1949—Pedersoli appeared as a swimmer in a short sequence in a pool, and still credited under his real name, Carlo Pedersoli.

During the 1950s and part of the 1960s, Pedersoli appeared playing minor parts. In 1951 he played a member of the Praetorian Guard in Quo Vadis. This epic movie, was shot on location in Rome and in Cinecittà, made by MGM and directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Pedersoli acted alongside Sophia Loren (as a slave), both were cast in the movie as uncredited extras. Sergio Leone worked also on it, as an assistant director. In 1954 Pedersoli appeared in Siluri umani (Human Torpedoes, by director Antonio Leonviola) and in 1955 in Mario Monicelli’s Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A Hero of Our Times), alongside Alberto Sordi. In 1967 film director Giuseppe Colizzi offered him a role in Dio perdona… io no! (God Forgives…

I Don’t!). On the set Pedersoli met another unknown young actor, Mario Girotti (Terence Hill) this was the moment they went on to become the notorious film duo.

Although Pedersoli had met Girotti before on the set of Annibale (Hannibal, 1959). The film director asked the two actors to change their names, deeming to be too Italian-sounding for a Western movie: Pedersoli chose Bud Spencer, with Bud inspired by Budweiser beer and Spencer by the actor Spencer Tracy. The duo garnered world acclaim and attracted millions to theater seats with their action-comedy movies. Spencer and Hill appeared in, produced and directed more than 20 films together. In 2005 Spencer entered politics, unsuccessfully standing as regional councillor in Lazio for the Forza Italia party— an Italian centre-right-wing political party with populist tendencies. Since its foundation Silvio Berlusconi, four

times Prime Minister of Italy, was the leader of the party.

The opposition criticised Bud Spencer for engaging in ‘La politica dello spettacolo’ (‘The politic of the spectacle’)— echoing Guy Debord’s seminal publication The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. pp. 140–141 Silvana Mangano (April 21, 1930–December 16, 1989) was an Italian actress. Raised in poverty during World War II, Mangano trained as a dancer and worked as a model before winning a ‘Miss Rome’ beauty pageant in 1946. This led to work in films; she achieved a notable success in Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and continued working in films for almost four more decades. Mangano remained a favorite star between the 1950s and 1970s, appearing i.a. in L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, by Vittorio De Sica, 1954), Teorema (Theorem, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968) and Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice,

by Luchino Visconti, 1971). Her daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis co-produced with her father on Mangano’s penultimate film, Dune (David Lynch, 1984). pp. 142–143 (Piazza del Popolo) Superman (First appearance: Action Comics #1, June 1938) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster— high school students living in Cleveland, Ohio—in 1933.

They sold Superman to Detective Comics, the future DC Comics, in 1938. Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 (cover-dated June 1938) and subsequently appeared in various radio serials, newspaper strips, television programs, films, and video games. With this success, Superman helped to create the superhero archetype and establish its primacy within the American comic book.

The character is also referred to by such epithets as the Man of Steel, the Man of Tomorrow, and The Last Son of Krypton. Superman has appeared in movies almost since his inception. He debuted in cinemas in a series of animated shorts beginning in 1941, and then starred in two movie serials in 1948 and 1950. An independent studio, Lippert Pictures, released the first Superman feature film, Superman and the Mole Men, starring George Reeves, in 1951. Superman Returns is a 2006 American superhero film directed and produced by Bryan Singer. It is based on the DC Comics character Superman and serves as a homage sequel to the motion pictures Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), ignoring the events of Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) to create a soft reboot. The film tells the story of the title character returning to Earth after a five-year absence. He finds that his love interest Lois 176 Lane has moved on with her life, and that his archenemy 177 Lex Luthor is plotting a scheme that will destroy Superman and the world. pp. 144–147 John Lennon (John Winston Lennon; October 9, 1940– December 8, 1980) was an English singer and songwriter who co-founded the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. The Beatles appeared in five motion pictures, most of which were very well received. Each of their films had the same name as their associated soundtrack album and a song on that album. In late 1966, John Lennon took time off to play a supporting character, Gripweed, in a film called How I Won the War, directed by Richard Lester (Lester is notable for his work with the Beatles in the 1960s and his work on the Superman film series in the 1980s). It was a satire of World War II films, and its dry, ironic British

humor was not well received by American audiences.

Lennon would later produce avant-garde films with his second wife Yoko Ono, such as Rape (1969) which was produced for the Austrian television network ORF. The film is from the point of view of a cameraman following a young woman through the streets of a city. He chases her down an alley and knocks her over, in a symbolic form of video assault. pp. 148–149 Roberto Benigni (Roberto Remigio Benigni; October 27, 1952–) is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director. He co-wrote, directed and acted in the 1997 film La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997), which garnered him the Oscar for Best Actor and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1998. Benign has collaborated with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in three of his films: Down 178 by Law (1986), Night on Earth (1991) and Coffee and 179 Cigarettes (2003). Benigni’s wife Nicoletta Braschi has starred in most of the films he has directed. Benigni had a rare serious role in Federico Fellini’s last film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989). Benigni is starring and directed La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005). The film is a romantic comedy set in contemporary Rome and in occupied Baghdad during the Iraq War. The story, inspired by the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, features singer-songwriter Tom Waits as himself in recurring dream sequences. The opening scene is a celebration of love, with an abundance of poetic references mentioned in the closing credits. Benigni is an improvisatory poet (poesia estemporanea is a form of art popularly followed and practiced in Tuscany), appreciated for his explanation and recitations of Dante’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) by memory. During 2006 and 2007, Benigni toured Italy with his ‘one man show’

TuttoDante (Everything About Dante). Combining current events and memories of his past narrated with an ironic undertone, Benigni then begins a journey of poetry and passion through the world of the Divine Comedy. pp. 151–153 Massimo Troisi (February 19, 1953–June 4, 1994) was an Italian actor, film director, and poet. He is best known for his role as Mario Ruoppolo in the 1994 film Il Postino. Troisi is considered as the main representative of the Nuova comicità napoletana (New Neapolitan Comedy), arising at the beginnings of the 1970s. Troisi was nicknamed ‘comico dei sentimenti’ (‘comedian of sentiments/feelings’) or ‘Pulcinella senza maschera’ (‘clown without face paint’). He is considered as one of the most multifaceted interpreter in history of Italian theatre and cinema. Troisi starred alongside Roberto Benigni in Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry, 1984), in which they play two friends who are accidentally transported back in time to the 15th century. In the following years, he starred alongside Marcello Mastroianni, in Ettore Scola’s Splendor (1989) and Che ora è? (What Time Is It?, 1989). Troisi came to international fame through the success of Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford in 1994. Troisi died with only 41 years of age, of a heart attack in his sister’s house in Ostia. Only several hours after the main filming on Il Postino had concluded. It was reported that he postponed surgery to complete the film. Troisi was posthumously nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his role. Father of Neapolitan theatre of the 20th century, Eduardo De Filippo, said of him that “he was a comic actor of the future, but with his roots in the past”.

p. 155 Nanni Moretti (Giovanni Moretti; August 19, 1953–) is a multiple award winning Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. While growing up Moretti discovered his two passions, the cinema and water polo—with the latter he is ‘sharing’ a similar enthusiasm with actor Bud Spencer (see above). Having finished his studies Moretti pursued a career as a producer, and in 1973 directed his first two short films: Pâté de bourgeois and La sconfitta (The Defeat). Moretti is best known for his films Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993; followed in 1998 by a sequel, Aprile) and La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001) with whom he won the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Moretti received also awards in other international film festival as in Venice (1981, 1989), Berlin (1986) and Chicago (2003, 2008). Moretti is an outspoken political activist: in 2002 he organized street protests against the government of Silvio Berlusconi.

In 2006 one of the most successful films in Italy was Moretti’s comedy-drama Il caimano (The Caiman; meaning ‘predator’). The movie is about Berlusconi’s controversies and focuses on Berlusconi’s vicissitudes. In one of the three portraits—of the Italian prime minister— Moretti himself plays Berlusconi. The film was released just before the beginning of the 2006 elections, in which Berlusconi lost. Numerous Italian film makers play minor parts in the film. These include Paolo Sorrentino, Giuliano Montaldo, Carlo Mazzacurati, Tatti Sanguinetti, Paolo Virzì and Antonello Grimaldi, while actor and director Michele Placido is one of the main characters. p. 157 (‘Walk of Fame’, Via di Mezzocammino, Rome)

Text sources: wikipedia.org and other web sites – January 2017

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