Mario soffici

Mario Soffici (1964)

Mario Soffici (Florence, May 14, 1900 - Buenos Aires, May 10, 1977) was an Italian film director, actor and screenwriter living in Argentina. He was one of the founders of the entity Directores Argentinos Cinematográficos in 1958.

Biography

Born in Florence in 1900, he arrived in Argentina at the age of nine. He graduated as an electronic technician, but at the age of 28 he was already an established classical theater actor, and on a tour of Barcelona he met the director José Ferreyra; the two were fascinated with talkies and talked about the project of filming in Buenos Aires, once they knew the technique. He studied cinema from a technical point of view, according to what he said: he would go see how it was filmed and then see the developed negatives and critically analyze the results, trying to discover the laws of kinetics.

What he was interested in investigating is the connection between the projected image and the eye's ability to see, since he did have experience in the art of storytelling. Other directors of the time were content to film what happened, while Soffici was maniac about investigating every possible hint that the camera had. Unlike Romero, he has obsessive minutiae to film.

He filmed 40 films and worked as an actor and as a supervisor in some films for Argentina Sono Film. His debut in feature films is Alma de bandoneón (1934). Within this genre, he filmed Puerto Nuevo (1935), The circus ride (1944) and It happened in my neighborhood (1951) and, within the “divas” movies, famous close-ups with the faces of Zully Moreno (Celos, La gata, La dama del mar) and Amelia Bence in Julia's Sin.

For his own projects, Soffici will take into account books by his writer friends. The search for this stage culminated in the most important production of the 1930s: Prisoners of the Earth (1939), "open denunciation of the inhumane exploitation in the yerbatales, to which it incorporates nature as one more protagonist of the drama” says the scholar Octavio Getino, in his book Cine Argentino, entre lo posible y lo desirable. Prisoners of the Earth is the film that establishes him as a “social” film director.

Interpreting "El linyera" 1933.

Soffici was the main figure of the 1930s: he came from the theater and had become close to his colleague, the "Black" Ferreyra, to know the cinematographic management. Soffici possessed, however, something more than cinematographic rigor: he was guided by the desire to investigate national issues with great respect for cultural values, avoiding easy schematisms. That eagerness already appears in North Wind (1937), a rural drama about the social and human conflicts of the field laborer.

He continued it in Kilometro 111 (1938), in which he addressed the exploitation exercised by collector intermediaries on farmers, within the imperial framework of managing the national railways. The path of flames (1941) deserves a special mention. Filmed in Mendoza, it gave him the opportunity to tour the entire province, delve into the entire mountain range and find the best place in Tupungato to cross-breed the animals. This was a feature of his filmography: he loved the “indoors”, the outdoors, nature.

When Soffici was asked the reason for the accumulation in his filmography of weak works between 1947 and 1956 (the years of Juan Domingo Perón's government) he replied that the climate of that time did not favor expression.

In 1973, with the transitory return of democracy, the Peronist president Héctor J. Cámpora appointed Hugo del Carril and Mario Soffici to direct the Film Institute which, with the operational direction of Soffici, developed an important task to revitalize the national cinema, destroyed by the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía and Alejandro Agustín Lanusse. A Cinema Law project was elaborated that promoted national production and aimed to reconquer Spanish-speaking markets, regionalized production was foreseen, the training of technicians and students in exhibition circuits in Latin America.

The censorship that had been cruel to national and foreign production was abolished. During his tenure, national production increased: 39 films in 1973 and 40 in 1974. Pre-production began on films such as La Patagonia rebelde by Héctor Olivera, Quebracho by Ricardo Wüllicher, La Raulito by Lautaro Murúa, La trugua by Sergio Renán. That climate of freedom and creativity ended when María Estela Martínez de Perón assumed the presidency following Perón's death. Soffici found out through the press that he had ceased to be director of the Institute.

Filmography