Lizzani, Carlo

(1922-)

   Director, screenwriter, film historian, critic. A passionate cinephile from a very early age, Lizzani began attending the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in his late teens while also contributing articles to film journals, including the prestigious Cinema. After participating in the Resistance movement during the war, he acted the role of a parish priest killed by the Germans in Aldo Vergano's Resistance film, Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946) before serving as assistant director to Roberto Rossellini on Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947). At the same time he worked with Giuseppe De Santis on the screenplays of Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and made a number of socially committed documentaries before directing his first feature, Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits! 1951), a film on the Resistance movement in northern Italy; because the film was strongly opposed by the ruling center-right Christian Democrat authorities, it was financed autonomously through a film workers' cooperative.

   After Ai margini della metropoli (At the Edge of the City, 1952) and L'amore che si paga (The Love One Pays For), one of the five episodes of the compilation film L'amore in citta (Love in the City, 1953), Lizzani directed Cronache di poveri amanti (Chronicle of Poor Lovers, 1954), the adaption of an anti-Fascist novel by Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini, which was again produced by an independent cooperative and again strongly opposed by the authorities on the grounds of alleged left-wing bias. Despite concerted pressure from the Italian authorities, who blocked the film's international release for several years, the film was highly acclaimed at Cannes, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.

   Having by this time also published an authoritative history of Italian cinema, Lizzani then veered more toward the mainstream with Lo svitato (Screwball, 1955), a comedy featuring the then little-known Dario Fo, before journeying to China, still largely closed to Westerners, to make the feature documentary La muraglia cinese (Behind the Great Wall, 1958). After Esterina (1959) Lizzani returned to the war years and to the Resistance movement with Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome, 1960), L'oro di Roma (Gold of Rome, 1961), and Il processo di Verona (The Verona Trial, 1963), films that confirmed both his directorial professionalism and his social commitment. In the following years he continued to make films with a historical or political focus, among them Mussolini ultimo atto (Last Days of Mussolini, 1974) and Caro Gorbaciov (Dear Gorbachev, 1988), but also worked extensively within many of the more popular genres, making Westerns such as Un fiume di dollari (River of Dollars, 1966) and Requiescant (Kill and Pray, 1967)—the latter memorable not least for the appearance of Pier Paolo Pasolini as a revolutionary Mexican priest—and urban crime and gangster thrillers such as Banditi a Milano (Bandits in Milan, 1968), Torino nera (Black Turin, 1972), and Crazy Joe (1974). In 1980, while serving a four-year term as director of the Venice Festival, he returned to a cinema of strong social commitment with Fontamara (1980), a moving adaptation of a novel by Ignazio Silone about the plight of peasants in southern Italy, set during the Fascist period. In 1996 Lizzani's passion for both history and the cinema came together in Celluloide (Celluloid, 1996), a fictional recreation of the making of Rossellini's landmark film Roma citta aperta (Rome Open City, 1945, also known as Open City). In more recent times he has worked largely for television, directing, among others, Maria Jose, l'ultima regina (Maria Jose, the Last Queen, 2001), an enormously popular miniseries on the life of the daughter-in-law of King Victor Emmanuel III, and Le cinque giornate di Milano (The Five Days of Milan, 2004), a two-part telefilm on the revolutionary uprising in Milan in 1848.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira