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

Few European film-makers combined artistic ambitions with a genuine populist spirit in the manner of Vittorio De Sica. In his prolific career, the actor-director made many films on social subjects which nonetheless engaged a mass audience. A Neapolitan by birth, De Sica came from humble roots, working as a theatre actor in the early 1920s. His stage success led De Sica to films where he proved to be a popular actor, mounting more than thirty film credits before his directorial debut with Rosa Scarlatte (which he co-directed with Giuseppe Amato). Even after his success as a director, De Sica was a much sought after performer; appearing in such classics as Max Ophüls’ Madame de… and Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere.

De Sica’s fourth outing as a director was his first collaboration with screenwriter and film theorist Cesare Zavattini. The Children Are Watching Us anticipated neorealism in its detached focus on a young boy’s growing isolation from his mother. De Sica’s skill at directing actors, especially children, is strongly borne in this film and in Shoeshine one of the earliest neorealist films. A story of the friendship between two boys who sell shoes for a living in post-war Rome, the film received a special Oscar at the Academy Awards and earned praise from Orson Welles and Luis Buñuel. The Bicycle Thief, made in 1948 became one of the most successful Italian films of all time as well as the representative work of Italian neorealism. Inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s films as well as King Vidor’s The Crowd, De Sica made use of a non-professional cast and on-location shooting to create an indelible portrait of post-war depredation. The fable-like simplicity of a man whose life is thrown in disarray after his bicycle is stolen struck a chord with audiences around the world and remains constant in the repertoire of international cinema to this day.

Umberto D is often regarded by some commentators as the final neorealist film; a tragicomic portrait of a lonely old man’s bitter struggle to maintain his home. The Gold of Naples was a multi-episode comedy, boasting a cast that comprised of actors such as Silvana Mangano, Eduardo De Fillippo, Paolo Stoppa, Totò, and a young actress whom the director discovered – Sophia Loren. One notable episode featured De Sica himself; the role of a Count who struggled with a severe gambling addiction. This was an ironic self-parody of De Sica’s real life gambling woes. Frequently strapped for cash, he often took purely commercial assignments (such as David O. Selznick’s international production Terminal Station) merely to cover his growing debts. His personal efforts in this difficult period included The Roof, a neorealist love story of a couple struggling to find a home to live in.

He would return to form with a series of collaborations with Sophia Loren. La Ciociaria (Two Women) adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia is notable for its sobriety in dealing with the rape of women during wartime. Sophia Loren’s performance was especially commendable and she won an Oscar for Best Actress, the first time the award was given to an actress in a foreign film. The Lottery, De Sica’s contribution to Carlo Ponti’s omnibus Boccaccio’70, was a satire of Italian machismo starring Loren as a carnival worker who offers herself as a prize at a fairground lottery. Marriage Italian-Style, which paired Sophia Loren opposite Marcello Mastroianni, was a ironic examination of marriage. The film’s refinement and its powerful sense of time passing marks it as a deeply personal film. However, these late triumphs were brief and with the exception of the 1970 The Garden of Finzi-Continis, De Sica’s final period was one of slow decline. Yet nearly forty years after his death, his best films survive as part of an artistically rich period in film history. —Mr Bongo

Born in Bologna in 1922, Pier Paolo Pasolini left behind a searing legacy that haunts contemporary Italy more than thirty years after his death. More than anyone, Pasolini gazed deeply into Italy’s role in the spread of Fascism and, more controversially, the continuing influence of its ideas in post-war Europe. For him, this was a matter of great personal significance; his father was a soldier in the Fascist Army (he had once protected Mussolini from an assassination attempt) while his brother joined the resistance only to be murdered in an ambush. This personal trauma coincided with a period of intellectual development as Pasolini engaged with Marxist philosophy; especially the works of Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party (PCI). His relationship with the PCI, however, was tense. As a poet and intellectual, Pasolini scrutinized his fellow Communists as critically as he did bourgeois society. His enemies retaliated by targeting his personal life; the first instance being his 1949 expulsion from the Party when they learnt of his homosexuality. Employed as a teacher in the Udine city of the Friulian province, Pasolini lost his job and was forced to move to Rome with his mother.

Rome, however, proved to be the site of Pasolini’s artistic flowering. During his time there, he took various odd jobs to make ends meet. He lived in the shantytowns on the outskirts where the borgate resided. Pasolini was fascinated with their unique way of life, their unconscious subversion of Catholic rituals and bourgeois morals. His novel Ragazzi di Vita, published in 1955, was a chronicle of Rome’s lower depths; its non-judgmental portrait of criminal behavior earned it condemnation from both the ruling Christian Democrat party as well as the Communists. Federico Fellini, however, was sufficiently impressed with its wealth of detail and the accuracy of the dialogue to employ Pasolini as a dialogue consultant on Nights of Cabiria (1957). The resulting experience led Pasolini to consider cinema as a medium to express his eclectic ideas.

Bernardo Bertolucci, who served as Pasolini’s assistant on Accattone (1961), noted that the film’s visual style owed more to the Renaissance masters than the cinema. In his first film, the framings of the titular pimp (played by Franco Citti) and his fellow vagabonds hearkened to the religious paintings of Massacio and Mantegna. He continued in a similar vein with Mamma Roma, where the casting of Ettore Garofalo as the son of Mamma Ro (Anna Magnani) was based on his resemblance to a Carravaggio painting. Both films also took inspiration from Italian Neorealism with Anna Magnani’s casting in Mamma Roma a deliberate reference to her performances in Rome, Open City, L’Amore and Bellisima. Like Arthur Rimbaud, Pasolini’s art endowed a sacred dimension to those on the margins of society, outlaws whose lifestyle subverted the morals of the establishment. Pasolini’s use of religious iconography referred to the peasant origins of the Christian religion which the modern Church had strayed away from.

His 1964 film on the Life of Jesus, The Gospel According to St. Mathew was shot in the South of Italy. It was a “literal” reading of the chosen gospel, with dialogue drawn from the text. The film’s style was similar to Accattone and Mamma Roma in its casting of non-professionals and its eclectic musical and pictorial references. With the exceptions of Teorema and The Hawks and the Sparrows, all of Pasolini’s later films were adaptations of classic texts. These included Greek tragedies (Oedipus Rex and Medea) and the films which formed the ‘Trilogy of Life’ – The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Arabian Nights. These period films aimed to portray the richness of peasant cultures by portraying its roots in the ancient world; highlighting its importance in the rise of civilization. These flights into the past, manifested as a result of Pasolini’s growing disillusionment with contemporary Italy. He decried the spread of consumerism in Italy which led to increasing homogenization, suppressing the proletarian culture he took inspiration from. His despairing vision was fully unleashed in Saló, which proved to be his last film.

The film was a loose adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom written by the infamous Marquis de Sade; its setting was transplanted to the final days of the Second World War, in the Nazi-established Saló Republic. The film’s shocking violence made it one of the most controversial films ever made, subsequently banned in many parts of the world. Its notoriety is heightened by the fact that Pasolini was murdered two weeks before its premier. The circumstances of his brutal killing resulted in a cloud of speculation, further fueled by the Italian police re-opening the case in 2005. At 53 years of age, Pasolini achieved a considerable body of work, a cinematic oeuvre of stirring originality. For Bernardo Bertolucci, his sudden passing marked the end of an era in Italian cinema. —Mr Bongo

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