Gianni Di Venanzo began his career during World War II as camera assistant to Aldo Tonti, Otello Martelli and others, working on the films of key neorealist directors such as Visconti, Rossellini, De Santis and De Sica. Given his training in the flat documentary style favored by these filmmakers, as well as the more somber approach of Tonti, it is all the more surprising that he developed in his work with Michelangelo Antonioni the bleached-out, shimmering whiteness that now so strongly evokes classic Italian black and white cinematography.
Working with Antonioni, particularly on ‘Le amiche’, he also developed a capacity for filming complex and changing groupings of actors, experience that proved useful when he worked with Fellini on ‘Otto e mezzo’. Fellini’s masterpiece can also be seen as Di Venanzo’s, with its subtle gradations of light and shadow essential in helping the viewer to navigate this complex assemblage of dream, memory, imagination and reality.
Di Venanzo… read more
Gianni Di Venanzo began his career during World War II as camera assistant to Aldo Tonti, Otello Martelli and others, working on the films of key neorealist directors such as Visconti, Rossellini, De Santis and De Sica. Given his training in the flat documentary style favored by these filmmakers, as well as the more somber approach of Tonti, it is all the more surprising that he developed in his work with Michelangelo Antonioni the bleached-out, shimmering whiteness that now so strongly evokes classic Italian black and white cinematography.
Working with Antonioni, particularly on ‘Le amiche’, he also developed a capacity for filming complex and changing groupings of actors, experience that proved useful when he worked with Fellini on ‘Otto e mezzo’. Fellini’s masterpiece can also be seen as Di Venanzo’s, with its subtle gradations of light and shadow essential in helping the viewer to navigate this complex assemblage of dream, memory, imagination and reality.
Di Venanzo put his early experience as a cameraman to good use also in his work with Francesco Rosi, particularly in ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ and ‘Le mani sulla città’. In these films he recreated the documentary feeling of neorealism, adding another level of chronological signification to each.
He was universally lauded for his perfectionism and the variety of his photographic talents. John Gillett says these opinions were based on Di Venanzo’s “…extraordinary ability to establish a rapport with each director; a facility for sensing the particular textures they sought after; and sheer tenacity in getting those precise effects on to celluloid.” His untimely death at 45 from hepatitis has cast him into an undeserved obscurity in film history. Had he survived he would surely equal, and perhaps surpass, the reputation now held only by Vittorio Storaro among Italian cinematographers. —Stephen Brophy.
