Liliana Cavani

Liliana Cavani
Cavani, third from the right, at the 2009 Venice film festival, as member of the jury
Born	disputed Carpi, Modena

Liliana Cavani is an Italian director and screenwriter, best known for her 1974 feature film, Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), which launched actress Charlotte Rampling to international stardom. According to the Filmografia di Liliana Cavani, different biographers dispute the year of her birth, however. According to the date given by Áine O'Healy (in the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, 2007, p. 427) Cavani was born on 12 January 1937, although Liehm states 1935 (Passion and Defiance, 1984, p. 198). Other commentators cite 1933 and 1936, with 1933 prevailing on Internet biographies such as IMDb.

In 1979, she was a member of the jury at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival. Her 1985 film The Berlin Affair was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival.

Early life

Liliana Cavani was born to a working-class family in Carpi, near Modena in the province of Emilia romana, the same region that provided Italian Cinema with Bernardo Bertollucci and Marco Bellochio. Her father, an architect from Mantua, belonged to a conservative bourgeois family of landowners. "My father was an architect interested in urban development. He took me to museums. He had worked in urban planning in Baghdad in 1956, when Iraq was still under British control. My mother was very strong, very capable, and very sweet." Cavani explained in an interview. Her mother was passionate about films and took her to the movies every Sunday from an early age. On her mother side Cavani came from a working class family of militant antifascist. Her maternal grandfather, a syndicalist introduced her to the works of Engels, Marx and Bakunin. "I had both Fascist and anti-Fascist relatives," she says. Her wartime-era upbringing made her more sensitive to the wave of political and egalitarian activism that would follow the 1950s economic boom, including the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. "The boom of the 1950s arose from the fact that the women also worked," she says. "[Women] could buy apartments and send their children to school, and their children went from being blue-collar laborers to white-collar professionals." She would maintain during her career a secular nonpolitical approach.

Cavani education was literary, linguistic, and classical. She graduated in literature and philology at Bologna University in 1960 under the tutelage of philologist Raffaele Spognano, writing a dissertation on the fifteen century poet and nobleman Marsilio Pio. Cavani initially intended to become an archeologist, a profession she soon abandoned in order to pursue her passion for the moving image. She moved south to attend Rome's renowned "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia," (Experimental Cinematography Center) inaugurated by Benito Mussolini prior to World War II. She studied documentary filmmaking and obtained her diploma with the short films "Incontro notturno" (1961), about the friendship between a white and Senegalese and "L'evento" (1962) about a group of tourists who killed for fun, which won an award as the best short of that course.

Filmography

• Francesco d'Assisi (1966)
• Galileo (1968)
• I Cannibali (1969)
• L’ospite (1971)
• Milarepa (1973)
• Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974)
• Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil) (1977)
• La pelle (1981)
• Oltre la porta (1982)
• Interno Berlinese (The Berlin Affair) (1985)
• Francesco (1989)
• Dove siete? Io sono qui (1993)
• Ripley's Game (2002)
• De Gasperi, l'uomo della speranza (2005)
• Einstein (2008)

External links

• Filmografia di Liliana Cavani
• Liliana Cavani at IMDb