Guerra, Tonino

(1920-)

(Born Antonio Guerra.) Poet, painter, novelist, installation artist, screenwriter. While establishing a strong reputation as a dialect poet and fiction writer in the late 1950s, Guerra also began to write for the cinema, his first collaborations being with Giuseppe De Santis on Uomini e lupi (Men and Wolves, 1956) and La strada lunga un anno (The Year Long Road, 1958). Two years later, with his screenplay for L'avventura (The Adventure, 1960), he initiated what would become a lifelong partnership with Michelangelo Antonioni, which would see him writing all of Antonioni's subsequent films (with the exception of The Passenger [1975]) and sharing an Oscar nomination with the director for the screenplay of Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966). By the mid-1960s, while continuing to publish poetry and fiction, he had also instituted a similarly long and fruitful partnership with Francesco Rosi, for whom he would write all the major films from C'era una volta (More Than a Miracle, 1967) to La tregua (The Truce, 1997). Only a few years later his contribution to Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973) earned him his second Oscar nomination for screenwriting.

   During the 1980s he continued to write for Antonioni and Fellini while also collaborating with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani on several of their most acclaimed films, including La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982), Kaos (Chaos, 1984), and Good morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon, 1987). In 1983, having acquired an international reputation, Guerra was sought out by legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky to help write the screenplay for Nostalghia (1983). Soon after, he also began working with eminent Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos, with whom he would eventually make seven films, beginning with Taxidi sta Kithira (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), for which he received the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, and continuing through to the most recent Trilogia I: To Livadi pou dakryzei (Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow, 2004), which was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.

   After receiving a host of prizes and awards during his long career, in 2004 Guerra was also honored with the title of Best European Screen-writer at the first Festival of European Screenwriters at Strasbourg.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira