Happy Birthday, Francesco Rosi! Born today in 1922, this distinguished Italian producer and film director is best known for his political films, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s that often appeared to have political messages.
As he matured as a director, his film topics became less politically oriented and more angled toward literature, despite the more traditional slant of his later work.
Born in Naples, Campania, Italy, Rosi's father worked in the shipping industry, but was also a cartoonist and had, at one time been reprimanded for his satirical drawings of Benito Mussolini and King Vittorio Emmanuel III.
During World War II, Rosi went to college alongside Italian politician Giorgio Napolitano who was later to become the 11th Italian President (2006–2015). Rosi studied law and then embarked on a career as an illustrator of children's books.
At the same time, he began working as a reporter for Radio Napoli.
While there, Rosi became friendly with Italian novelist and screenwriter Raffaele La Capria, Italian film actor and comedian Aldo Giuffrè and Italian playwright, screenwriter, director and author Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, with each of whom Rosi would later often collaborate.
In 1946, Rosi's show business career began as an assistant to Italian screenwriter and director Ettore Giannini for the stage production of a work by Italian poet, songwriter, playwright and fascist Salvatore Di Giacomo.
Two years later, Rosi then entered the film industry and worked as an assistant to Luchino Visconti ('Ossessione', 'Senso', 'Rocco and His Brothers', 'The Leopard').
This was on his 1948 Italian black and white drama/docufiction film 'La Terra Trema' ('The Earth Trembles'), his 1951 Italian black and white drama/comedy film 'Bellissima' (1951) and his 1954 Italian Technicolor historical melodrama drama/romance film 'Senso' ('Sense', also known as 'The Wanton Countess').
Rosi's emergence as a director is considered to be his 1958 Italian black and white crime/drama film 'La sfida' ('The Challenge'). However, the realist nature of this film later caused a stir in alluding to mafia control of the government.
Of the film, Rosi himself said, "A director makes his first film with passion and without regard for what has gone before".
However, English film critic and writer David Shipman commented "... but this is in fact a reworking of La Terra Trema, with the Visconti arias replaced by [Cesare] Zavattini's naturalism."
Rosi was one of the central figures of the politicised post-neorealist 1960s and 1970s of Italian cinema.
This was along with Pier Paolo Pasolini ('The Gospel According to St. Matthew', 'Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom'), Gillo Pontecorvo ('The Battle of Algiers'), and Vittorio and Paolo Taviani ('The Night of the Shooting Stars').
This was also along with Italian screenwriter and film director Ettore Scola and Italian film director, stage director and screenwriter Valerio Zurlini.
Dealing with a corrupt postwar Italy, Rosi's films take on controversial issues. This included co-writing and directing his 1962 Italian black and white political drama/docudrama film 'Salvatore Giuliano'.
The film examined the life of the titular twenty-eight-year-old Sicilian gangster (an uncredited Pietro Cammarata), using the technique of a long series of flashbacks, one that became very popular thereafter.
Shot in a neorealist documentary, non-linear style, the film' follows the lives of those involved with the famous Sicilian bandit.
Giuliano is mostly off-screen during the film, and appears most notably as a bullet-ridden corpse found face down in a courtyard in Castelvetrano, a handgun and rifle by his side.
Later that same year, 'Salvatore Giuliano' won the Silver Bear for Best Director. This occurred at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in June of that same year.
In the early 1970s, Rosi directed the 1972 Italian biographical drama/crime film 'Il caso Mattei' ('The Mattei Affair').
The film centered on the controversy that surrounds the life and death of Italian administrator Enrico Mattei (Gian Maria Volonté).
'The Mattei affair' premiered at the 25th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year and won the Palme d'Or.
Seven years later, Rosi co-wrote and directed the first film of which he is best known. This was the 1979 Italian/French drama/historical drama film 'Cristo si è fermato a Eboli' ('Christ Stopped at Eboli').
It had been adapted from Italian painter, writer, activist, anti-fascist and doctor Carlo Levi's 1945 memoir of the same name.
Set in 1935, Italian artist and activist Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonte) is exiled to the remote village of Eboli for taking a stand against Mussolini's fascist regime.
Although intended as a punishment, the experience soon proves to be an uplifting one for Levi.
As he uses his medical knowledge to help the local villagers (Irene Papas, Paolo Bonacelli), Levi eventually finds himself inspired by their spirit and ability to maintain their values while in the depths of poverty.
'Christ Stopped at Eboli' was shown out of competition at the 32nd Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year.
Two months later, the film won two David di Donatello awards. These were for Best Film and Best Director.
However, 'Christ Stopped at Eboli' was tied with Italian film director and screenwriter Ermanno Olmi's three-hour 1978 Italian drama/history film 'L'Albero degli zoccoli' ('The Tree of Wooden Clogs').
This also included the 1979 Italian drama film 'Dimenticare Venezia' ('To Forget Venice'). This occurred at the 23rd David di Donatello Awards in late October.
Rosi had later been invited by the state-owned television service Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) to select a subject for filming of 'Christ Stopped at Eboli'.
Afterwards, the original three-and-a-half-hour film was cut into a four-part television programme.
This meant that it was now a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute feature film, of which Rosi later described as "a journey through my own conscience".
Two years later, Rosi co-wrote and directed another successful film and the second film of which he is best known. This was the 1981 Italian/French drama film 'Tre fratelli' ('Three Brothers').
After the death of their elderly mother, the three estranged Giuranna brothers -- a judge, Raffaele (Philippe Noiret); a counselor for troubled boys, Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno, who also plays young Donato Giuranna); and a laborer, Nicola (Michele Placido) -- return to their family home in the south of Italy to mourn.
Life has been difficult for the men, and they spend time in deep thought, contemplating how their progressive ideals have been lost to injustice and the various compromises they've made for their careers and families.
'Three Brothers' is an emotionally charged film built upon a triptych of back stories into the one central plot of the death of a beloved matriarch.
The leisurely, moving feature was based on the 1971 fiction book The Third Son by Soviet Russian writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet Andrei Platonov (the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov).
'Three Brothers' was screened out of competition at the 34th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year. It was also the opening film for the event.
Later that same year, 'Three Brothers' won four David di Donatello awards. These were for Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Charles Vanel), Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
The film was also nominated for three more David di Donatello awards for Best Film, Best Actor (Michele Placido), and Best Supporting Actress (Maddalena Crippa).
However, the film did not win. This occurred at the 25th David di Donatello Awards in late September 1981.
The following year, 'Three Brothers' received a nomination for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This occurred at the 54th Academy Awards in late March 1982.
One year later, 'Christ Stopped at Eboli' was the first film to receive a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This occurred at the 36th British Academy Film Awards in late March 1983.
At the 58th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2008, thirteen of Rosi's films were screened, in a section reserved for filmmakers of outstanding quality and achievement.
In the last part of his life, Rosi lived on the Via Gregoriana in Rome near the Spanish Steps.
On April 8, 2010, his wife, Giancarla Mandelli, passed at the Hospital Sant Eugenio in Rome, Lazio, Italy. This was as a result of burns caused by her dress catching fire from a cigarette.
Rosi and Mandelli had been married for forty-five years. They had also one daughter together, being Italian actress Carolina Rosi.
Two years later, the Venice Biennale awarded Rosi the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement between August and November 2012.
Three years later, Rosi passed whilst at home as a result of complications from bronchitis in Rome, Lazio, Italy on January 10, 2015. He was 92.
Later that same year, Paolo Sorrentino ('The Consequences of Love', 'The Great Beauty') dedicated his 2015 Italian comedy/drama film 'Youth' with a simple end credit "For Francesco Rosi".
Writing Rosi's obituary in The Guardian, English film critic and author David Robinson, along with English journalist, critic and actor John Francis Lane said:
"In his best films, the director Francesco Rosi ... was essentially a crusading, investigative journalist concerned with the corruption and inequalities of the economically depressed Italian south.
He believed that “the audience should not be just passive spectators”: he wanted to make people think and question."
The British Film Institute (BFI) recognized that Rosi had made historical films, war pictures and family dramas, in a directorial career that spanned almost four decades.
"...but he will be remembered above all as the master of the ‘cine-investigation’ and an influence on several generations of artists, including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roberto Saviano and Paolo Sorrentino."
Yet Rosi is like no other director. An artist with a passionate commitment to truth, he is never for a moment fooled into thinking he has found it.
Rosi constructs his films, mostly thrillers and political exposés, as dramatic inquiries, frequently into real situations, always into real social forces-the forces of corruption.
Fearless and controversial, Rosi was famous for taking on social and political issues in his films, questioning the establishment and advocating the rights of the disenfranchised.
Rosi had been active from 1948–1997.
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