Emmer, Luciano

(1918-)

   Documentarist, screenwriter, director. A passionate art lover, Emmer began what would become a lifelong engagement with the art documentary in the late 1930s with Racconto di un affresco (Story of a Fresco, 1938), a study of Giotto's work in the Cappella degli Scrovegni. After a host of acclaimed documentaries, including Isole nella laguna (Islands of the Laguna, 1948), for which he was awarded a Nastro d'argento for Best Documentary, in 1950 he directed his first fictional feature, Una domenica d'agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), a charming set of intertwining stories of Romans going to the beach on Sunday. In the next decade he alternated documentaries on artists such as Goya and Picasso with half a dozen well-structured and generally lighthearted feature films, among them Parigi e sempre Parigi (Paris Is Always Paris, 1951), Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952), Terza liceo (High School, 1954), and Il momento piu bello (The Most Wonderful Moment, 1957). After being forced by the censors to cut some key sequences from his La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window, 1960), Emmer decided to abandon cinema for television, where he achieved wide renown for his creative and innovative segments for the national advertising program Carosello, one of which involved filming contemporary Italian artists such as Renato Guttuso in their studios while they executed a drawing in two minutes.

   After almost three decades of successful television advertisements and high-quality documentaries, Emmer returned to the big screen with Basta! Ci faccio un film (Enough! I'll Make a Film about It, 1990), which in some ways reprised the high-school setting of his earlier Terza liceo. He has recently directed two more features, Una lunga lunga lunga notte d'amore (A Long Long Long Night of Love, 2001) and L'acqua . . . il fuoco (The Water. . . the Fire, 2003).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira