The Witches

Mauro Bolognini (28 June 1922 – 14 May 2001) was an Italian film director of literate sensibility, known for masterful handling of period subject matter.

Mauro Bolognini was born in Pistoia, Tuscany.

A former architectural student, Bolognini began his film career as an assistant to director Luigi Zampa in Italy, and directors Yves Allegret and Jean Delannoy in France. He began directing his own feature films in the mid 1950s, and had his first international success with Gli innamorati (“Wild Love”).

His other notable films of the 1950s and early 1960s include Giovani mariti (“Young Husbands”), La notte brava, La giornata balorda (“From a Roman Balcony”), and the Marcello Mastroianni-Claudia Cardinale starrer Il bell’Antonio (arguably his masterpiece), all written by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Parting professionally with Pasolini in 1961, Bolognini went on to direct two sensual love stories starring Cardinale, La Viaccia and Senilità, before turning his talents to a series of international anthology films, including Le bambole (The Dolls), I tre volti (“Three Faces of a Woman”), Le fate (“The Queens”) and Le streghe (The Witches).

Returning to features in the late 1960s with Mademoiselle De Maupin, his later works included the accomplished period dramas Metello and Bubu (both featuring Massimo Ranieri), Fatti di gente per bene (La Grande Bourgeoise) starring Giancarlo Giannini, Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance) with Anthony Quinn and Dominique Sanda, and La Dame aux camélias featuring a young Isabelle Huppert.

In his later years, Bolognini continued directing feature films, as well as opera and the television miniseries The Charterhouse of Parma and The Time Of Indifference. His final movie feature was the soft-core erotic drama Husbands and Lovers, released in 1992. In 1994 he directed the show that the top female Greek singer Haris Alexiou appeared in the world famous Odeon of Herodes Atticus. He died in Rome in 2001. —Wikipedia

The seminal figure of the neorealism movement, Vittorio De Sica was born in Sora, Italy, on July 7, 1901. Raised in Naples, he began working as an office clerk at a young age in order to help support his impoverished family. He became fascinated by acting while still a youth, and made his screen debut in 1918’s The Clemenceau Affair at the age of just 16. In 1923, De Sica joined Tatiana Pavlova’s famed stage company, and by the end of the decade his dashing good looks had made him one of the Italian theater’s most prominent matinee idols. With 1932’s La Vecchia Signora, he made his sound-era film debut and went on to become an even bigger star in the cinema, appearing primarily in light romantic comedies throughout the decade. In 1939, De Sica graduated to the director’s chair with Rose Scarlatte. Over the next two years he helmed three more features (1940’s Maddalena, Zero in Condotta along with 1941’s Teresa Venerdì and Un Garibaldino al Convento, respectively), but his work lacked distinction until he, along with fellow Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, began exploring the possibilities of making more humanistic movies documenting the harsh realities facing their countrymen as a result of World War II. With 1942’s I Bambini ci Guardano, De Sica revolutionized the Italian film industry, crafting a poignant, heartfelt portrait of a downtrodden culture free of the conventions of Hollywood production. Working with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who remained a central figure in the majority of his greatest work, De Sica employed non-professional actors and filmed not in studios but on the streets of Rome, all to flesh out the working-class drama of Zavattini’s script.

The war prevented De Sica from directing another film for four years, but finally in 1946 he resurfaced with the brilliant Sciuscià. His greatest film, Ladri di Biciclette, followed in 1948; a virtual textbook of neorealism in action, it featured all of the aesthetic’s key tenets: gritty production, almost improvisational acting, and a lean emotional compression, and it even added authentic documentary footage into the narrative to establish a greater sense of truth. (Like Sciuscià, Ladri di Biciclette won a special Academy Award; not until several years later was the Oscar category for Best Foreign Language Film officially established.) Three years later, De Sica returned with Miracolo a Milano. Its follow-up, 1952’s Umberto D., clearly ranked among his finest work, but when it proved to be a box-office disaster, he returned to the lighter material of his formative years with It Happened in the Park. The 1956 Il Tetto marked something of a return to neorealist form, but when it too failed commercially, De Sica’s career as a filmmaker was critically damaged. Unable to secure financing for subsequent projects, he turned his full focus to acting, starring in a string of pictures including 1957’s A Farewell to Arms (for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor) and 1959’s It Happened in Rome. Over the course of his long career, he appeared in over 150 features. Finally, in 1960, De Sica returned to directing with La Ciociara, leading his star Sophia Loren to an Academy Award. The 1963 Ieri, Oggi, Domani also won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but in many regards De Sica’s reign as one of the world’s great directors was over. Features like 1966’s Caccia alla Volpe, 1967’s Sette Volte Donna, and 1970’s Girasoli were lightweight at best, and although 1971’s Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini won yet another Academy Award, it bore little relation to his neorealist classics. De Sica died in Paris on November 13, 1974, following complications from surgery.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:87213~T1)

Pier Paolo Pasolini was among the most controversial and provocative filmmakers ever to impact the international cinema community. Emerging during the 1960s, Pasolini broke from his New Wave-inspired peers, drawing influence for his work not from other cinematic sources but from art, literature, folklore, and music. He was also among the few directors of his era to focus less on the process of filmmaking than on his subject matter, bringing to the screen the gritty desperation of life on the fringes. Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy, on March 5, 1922. The son of an army officer, he grew up at various points throughout the country, and began writing poetry at the age of seven. While studying art at the University of Bologna, he published his first book of poetry, Poesie a Casarsa, in 1942. A year later, he was drafted to serve in the armed forces during the waning months of World War II, and after Italy’s surrender his regiment was captured by the Germans. Pasolini soon escaped and fled to the small town of Casarsa, where he remained for several years. He joined the communist party in 1946 but was expelled three years later in the wake of an arrest for “moral indignity.”

In the late ‘40s, Pasolini resumed his university studies, and in 1950 he relocated to Rome, living in the city’s slums while working as a teacher. A homosexual, he fell in with the local underworld of prostitutes, hustlers, pimps, and thieves. Pasolini himself was often arrested in their company; he once attempted to rob a filling station and later helped a wanted criminal flee the police, and in 1955 these experiences converged in his first novel, the scandalous Ragazzi di vita. The book’s publication prompted the Italian courts to prosecute Pasolini on obscenity charges, the first of many such run-ins with the authorities. Regardless, Roman criminal culture remained at the forefront of his later work, and his second book, 1959’s Una Vita Violenta, also detailed the life of a slum child. At much the same time, Pasolini was also earning notice as a poet, and his 1957 collection Le Ceneri di Gramsci earned the Viareggio Prize. From 1955 to 1958, he also edited the avant-garde magazine Officina, which was later forced to cease publication following a Pasolini poem attacking Pope Pius XII on his deathbed.

Pasolini’s involvement in the cinema began rather quietly, with the 1954 screenplay for Mario Soldati’s La Donna del Fiume. Over the next several years, he also collaborated on scenarios for projects by Federico Fellini, Mauro Bolognini, and Luis Trenker, but in light of his other, more scandalous work his film material earned little notoriety. By the early ‘60s, however, the cinema became Pasolini’s central focus. After scrapping the completed screenplay for a project titled La Commare Secca (which he then passed along to Bernardo Bertolucci), he wrote another script, Accatone, which he directed in the slums with a non-professional cast in 1961. As with his literary debut, his film debut became the subject of much controversy, with moralists holding up the picture as proof of the need for stricter censorship guidelines. Abroad, the feature garnered honors at the Montreal and Karlovy Vary film festivals, and with his sophomore feature, 1962’s Mamma Roma, he won both the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in addition to Italy’s Silver Ribbon.

Pasolini next joined forced with Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ugo Gregoretti for the 1962 anthology RoGoPaG. His segment, “La ricotta,” starred Orson Welles as a filmmaker directing a movie on the life of Christ. While intended as an attack against the vulgarization of spirituality, the piece was prosecuted for “publicly maligning the religion of the state” and banned, with Pasolini receiving a four-month suspended prison sentence. He next completed 1963’s La rabbia, a compilation of newsreel footage compiled at the behest of Opus Films’ Gastone Ferrante. Comizi d’amore, a series of interviews investigating sexual mores in Italian society, followed a year later. Though an avowed atheist, Pasolini next began work on Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, another retelling of the Christ story shot in the arid foothills of southern Italy. As the international film community braced for controversy, the film’s premiere revealed perhaps the director’s most shocking artistic statement yet: a solemn, sincere illustration of the Gospel which many touted as among the greatest Biblical adaptations ever created. The worldwide critical response was highly favorable, and in addition to a pair of awards at Venice it also won the grand prize from the International Catholic Film Office.

The 1966 comic fable Uccellacci e Uccellini followed, featuring the comic actor Toto. Le Streghe and Capriccio all’italiana, a pair of comedic shorts also starring Toto, followed; originally intended for a feature-length picture, they were recut by Pasolini following his star’s sudden death. Edipo Re, a deeply personal adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, was Pasolini’s next major work, and premiered in 1967. After filming “La Sequenza del Fiore di Carta,” an episode in the anthology Amore e Rabbia, he began work on 1968’s Teorema, the most talked-about of all of his films. Originally intended as a verse tragedy for the theater, the sexually provocative tale of a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) whose influence leaves a bourgeois family forever altered was originally honored by the International Catholic Film Office, but their award was rescinded after the picture was denounced by the Vatican. Secular authorities also charged the film with obscenity and attempted to block its distribution, but upon Pasolini’s acquittal its release was allowed. Although many critics hailed Teorema as a masterpiece, harsher judgments came from more unlikely quarters: Many Marxists, for example, denounced the film for showing “a certain compassion” toward bourgeois society. Upon completing 1969’s Porcile, Pasolini mounted the next year’s Medea, a straightforward retelling of the fable which led into 1970’s Il Decamerone, a richly textured medieval tale which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Two more medieval-flavored works, 1972’s Racconti di Canterbury and 1974’s Fiore delle Mille e una Notte, the winner of a special Cannes jury prize, followed, and suggested that Pasolini had begun to move away from the mordant outrage of much of his previous work. However, his next film, 1975’s Salo, o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma, was in many respects the most disturbing of all of his films. An adaptation of the de Sade novel set at the tail end of World War II, it depicted the atrocities suffered by a group of kidnapped boys and girls at the hands of their Nazi captors. Deemed one of the most disquieting motion pictures ever filmed, Salo was Pasolini’s final work. On November 2, 1975, he was brutally murdered. After bludgeoning the director to death, his killer then repeatedly drove over the corpse in Pasolini’s own Alfa Romeo. While the murderer was later speculated to be a male prostitute, one of the many street dwellers whose kind Pasolini brought to the screen with so much conviction, speculation on the mysteries of his demise continue to run rampant, and it has been noted that his death served as a tragically appropriate coda to his art.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:105725~T1)

Franco Rossi, the Italian director who worked with Pasolini, and whose films in the 1950s won him attention as a promising addition to the neo-realist second generation, has died aged 81. Despite his early cinematic success, he earned more lasting fame with Italian audiences as the maker of high-class television mini-series adapted from Homer and Virgil.

Rossi was born in Florence, where he took part in anti-fascist resistance. After obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy, he worked for the city’s radio station. In 1948, he moved to Rome, where he was one of the founders of a radio programme dedicated to poetry, The Nightingale Theatre. His early cinema work was in the dubbing studios, and as an assistant to Mario Camerini and Renato Castellani.

In 1952, Rossi got his first chance to direct. I falsari was a crime thriller about a band of forgers, and he made several other potboilers before, in 1954, directing Il seduttore. Starring Alberto Sordi, and based on a play by the Catholic dramatist Diego Fabbri -which Luchino Visconti had directed on the stage – the film was Rossi’s first huge success.

The play was freely adapted to suit the comic talents of Sordi, who was already being identified as the transgressive, average Italian man, in this case a husband who believes he can hold on to the affections of both his wife and two mistresses. During production, Rossi had difficulty restraining Sordi’s excesses.

Yet it was his next two films for which he will be best remembered: Amici per la pelle (Friends For Life, 1955) and Morte di un amico (Death Of A Friend, 1960). Both dealt with loyalty between young male friends. The former, aimed at child audiences, was a touching story of misunderstanding between two boys of different social backgrounds on the playing fields. With its De Sica-like feel, it won the Catholic Film Office award at the Venice festival in the year of its release.

Death Of A Friend was based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who worked on the script with Rossi. A story set among petty thieves and prostitutes in the Roman suburbs, in many ways it anticipated what Pasolini was to achieve in his own first film, Accattone. Thanks to its subject matter, and to the Mediterranean good looks of Gianni Garko and Spyros Focas, the two young men making their acting debuts, the film inevitably became a gay cult movie – and Focas went on to star in Visconti’s Rocco And His Brothers.

Rossi was to choose a quite different subject for his next project, Odissea Nuda (Naked Odyssey, 1960). Shot in Polynesia, it was about a modern Ulysses travelling the south seas in search of identity. Dino De Laurentiis, who had already produced a filmic Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, went on to hire Rossi to direct The Odyssey, a mammoth (for those times) series for RAI-TV, which became a major cultural event, with Yugoslav actor Bekim Fehmiu as Ulysses and Irene Papas as Penelope. Each of the seven episodes was introduced by the ageing poet Giuseppe Ungaretti reading excerpts from Homer, which so irritated one critic that he accused Rossi of turning Homer’s princesses into washerwomen.

Though in years to come Rossi was to make the occasional film, including Smog, shot in Los Angeles in 1962, in which he tried none too successfuly to emulate Antonioni, he more or less abandoned cinema for a career as one of Italian television’s most accomplished directors. After Homer, he scored a hit with The Aeneid, and his later subjects ranged from Garibaldi, as a young man, to a Quo Vadis? with a curious script inventing Jesus’s childhood.

Among Rossi’s most interesting works for television were two stories on his favourite themes: the traumas of friendship and loyalty. Both set in Italy’s fascist period, one was the adaptation of an anti-fascist novel by politician Luigi Preti, Giovinezza, Giovinezza (the title referring to the young fascists’ anthem), while the other, Storia d’amore e d’amicizia (Story Of Love And Friendship, 1982) was about Roman boxers.

Before his recent stroke, Rossi had returned to work as a dubbing director. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Franco Rossi, film and television director, born April 28 1919; died June 5 2000. —guardian.co.uk