Giuseppe DeSantis

Giuseppe de Santis (Fondi, February 11, 1917 - Rome, May 16, 1997) was an Italian film director, one of the representatives of Italian neorealism that followed World War II. World.

Biography

Childhood and youth

The son of Oreste (a renowned geometer) and Teresa Goduti, from a very young age he was interested in literature. He composed and published stories dealing with peasant and family life. Between 1935 and 1940 he studied Philosophy and Letters in Rome, although he soon dropped out of college to dedicate himself to his true vocation: cinematography.

At that time he was in contact with a group of young intellectuals, who gathered around the magazine Meridiano di Roma and around the Cometa Art Gallery, which directed by the poet Libero de Libero. At that time, the group was elaborating a poetics and a global artistic vision turned towards interdisciplinarity and marked by rationality and concreteness: it was precisely these principles that Giuseppe De Santis understood could be better illustrated using cinema. At that time, the situation of Italian cinema was depressing, due to the autarkic limitation decreed by fascism against the importation of foreign films. Faced with this situation, a group of intellectuals gathered around the fortnightly magazine Cinema (directed by Vittorio Mussolini), in which Giuseppe De Santis already had a fixed section in 1940. This group included talented young people such as Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli. This magazine is partly responsible for the meeting of forces in favor of culture and against fascism that after the war will contribute to the renewal of Italian cinema.

Film career

During the 1940s, De Santis attended the Centro Experimental de Cinematografía, where he graduated with brilliance and where he was able to carry out his first directing tests. Around this time, he became acquainted with an important group of young Romans already involved in the clandestine anti-fascist struggle, including Pietro Ingrao. This group was decisive for his political orientation, since as a PCI militant he dealt with the problems of the working class and peasants.

Giuseppe De Santis during the shooting of the movie Days of Love (1954)

After some collaborations with established directors such as Visconti (in Obsesión / Ossessione, a film for which he even signed the script) and Rossellini (in Desiderio), he directs his first feature film in 1948, Tragic Hunting, which due to the themes it deals with (the struggle between the peasants of a cooperative and a group of landowners), the rhythm of popular drama, without forgetting the narrative demands Americans (variegated and dramatic scenes, eroticism, etc.), inaugurated the era of neorealism, to which De Santis contributed through a rigorous analysis of social forces, a direct vision of human reality and social (the actors are often hired from the locals), but fundamentally surpassing the didactic modes of Soviet cinematography and the ideology of national-popular literature with an original use of the camera, which reproduced cadences and narrative rhythms typical of the american cinema.

These characteristics are largely responsible for the success of his next film, Bitter Rice (1949), in which he narrates the hard struggle for life of women rice collectors, in a story that integrates the political analysis marked by the class struggle in the private sphere of the protagonists. In her skilful direction, the interpretation of Silvana Mangano stands out. For this film, De Santis and Carlo Lizzani get a Hollywood nomination for an Oscar for Best Screenplay.

The same themes, against a background of a still primitive and conflictive peasant society, that of his hometown, appear in his next film, Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi (1950). With Rome, eleventh hour, inspired by an event that had a great impact that happened in Rome (1952), and Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (1953), which analyzes the life and the problems of a maid worried that her great beauty represents an obstacle to the simple life to which she aspires, De Santis momentarily leaves citizen and bourgeois themes, in an Italy that in the midst of reconstruction is always oriented more towards form of American life. His direction stands out above all for the original use of the crane and for the pan focus technique, with which he dominates the wide movement, although controlled, and especially the movement of the masses.

With Days of Love (1954) and Men and Wolves (1956) he returned to the usual themes. In particular, Días de amor is his first color film and it won the Silver Shell at the III San Sebastian International Film Festival.

With La strada lunga un anno, which he shot in 1958 in Istria, the director's crisis began: a crisis of inspiration, fatigue, inability to deeply renew himself in a very critical historical period for the left, which he is unable to assimilate the negative events of Soviet communism (de-Stalinization, bloody repression of the revolution in Hungary in 1956...) But the entire vein of neorealism enters into crisis, leaving room for the 'Italian-style'.

The next stage in the direction of De Santis begins with La garçonnière (1960) in which he narrates the extramarital adventure of a man who, disillusioned, ends up returning to the family bosom; He will continue with Italiani brava gente (1964), an Italian-Soviet co-production about the withdrawal of Italian troops from Russia, in which the ideology reappears in a more surreptitious way in the form of a rebellion of workers of all the contending parties against the war, and ends with Un apprezzato professionalista di sicuro avvenire (1972), a melodrama based on themes that had triumphed in “Italian” comedy. But the director is not capable of adapting to the new tasks, and the film lacks punch, despite being directed and edited with the usual mastery.

Filmography (partial)

• 1942 - The cat (The gatta(short)
• 1945 - Giorni di glory
• 1947 Tragic hunt (Caccia tragica)
• 1949 - bitter rice (Lovely laugh)
• 1950 - Non c'e pace fra gli ulivi
• 1951 - Rome, 11th hour (Rome ore 11)
• 1953 - A little pussy per Anna Zaccheo
• 1954 - Days of love (Giorni d'amore)
• 1956 - Men and wolves (Uomini and lupi)
• 1957 - La strada lunga un anno
• 1960 - La garçonnière
• 1964 - Italiani brava people
• 1972 - An apprezzato professionista di sicuro avenire
• 1995 - Oggi è un altro giorno

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Venice International Film Festival

San Sebastian International Film Festival