Liliana Cavani

Liliana Cavani
Cavani, third from the right, at the 2009 Venice film festival, as member of the jury
Born	12 January 1937 Carpi, Modena, Italy

Liliana Cavani (born 12 January 1937) is an Italian film director and screenwriter.

She belongs to a generation of Italian filmmakers that came into prominence in the 1970s and includes Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Bellochio. Cavani became internationally known after the success of her 1974 feature film Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) .

A changeling and controversial filmmaker, her films have intellectual ambitions and historical concerns. In addition to feature films and documentaries, she has been an opera director.

Early life

Cavani was born in a working-class family in Carpi, near Modena in the province of Emilia-Romagna. According to the 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 have claimed 1933 and 1936, with 1933 prevailing on Internet biographies such as IMDb. Cavani's 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.

She graduated in literature and philology at Bologna University in 1960, writing a dissertation on the fifteen century poet and nobleman Marsilio Pio. Cavani had intended to become an archeologist, a profession she soon abandoned in order to pursue her passion for the moving image. She attended 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 two men, a white man and a Senegalese African, and L'evento (1962) about a group of tourists who killed for fun.

Film career and later life

Early films (1961- 1965)

While attending film school, Cavani won a competition at RAI, Italy's national television network, and took a job there as a director of historical documentaries in 1961. Her professional career thus began making documentaries for RAI between 1961 and 1965. This included Storia del III Reich, (History of the Third Reich) (1962-63), which chronicles the rise of the Nazi regime. It was the first historical investigation of German totalitarianism to appear on television. Other documentaries are: Leta di stalin ("The Stalin Years"), an investigation into the massive abuse of power perpetuated by the soviet leader; La donna nella Resistenza (1965); Phillipe Pétain, proceso a Vichy, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice film festival in 1965 in the documentary section. In this period she also made il girono della pace, a four-hour documentary on immigration south-to-north within Italy.

Francesco d'Assisi (1966)

Cavani made her first full-length feature film in 1966 with Francis of Assisi (Francesco d'Assisi). Made for television and aired in two parts, it was deeply influenced by the style of Rossellini and the atmosphere typical of the films of Pasolini; made in a period of political unrest, it was to become a kind of manifesto of dissenting Catholicism. Starring Lou Castel, it portrays Francis of Assisi as a slightly depress protestor and a avid, albeit mad, supporter of armed brother hood. The ideal defender of the 1968 student movement. The film was a great success, but also triggered many negative reactions. It was called " heretical, blasphemous and offensive for the faith of the Italian people". It was the first of many polemical reaction to Cavani's work.

Galileo (1968)

Her next film, Galileo (1968), focuses on the seventeenth-century conflict between science and religion. Galileo Galilei's belief that the truth should be proved by experimental methods, makes him clash with the dogmas of the church and he falls into the hands of the Inquisition. The film, originally made for television, was banned by the Italian censor, that considered it anticlerical and was never aired, but it found a distributor and was released on theaters.

The Cannibals (1969)

The Cannibals (I Cannibali) (1969) , Cavani's first film to rely on an independent production company, uses the myth of Antigone to present the contemporary political state of Italy. Inspired by Sophocles' Antigone, the film, set in the industrial city of Milan, recounts the struggle of a girl against the authorities that prevents burying the bodies of rebels killed by the police, to serve as a warning to its citizens. The brave girl, the only rebel in a city crushed by dictatorship, is aided only by a mysterious man who speaks an unknown language. The example of this two youngsters is soon followed by others. This work was not very well received by the public, so Cavani returned to television with the series of documentaries I bambini e noi (1970).

The Guest (1971)

Cavani's subsequent film L'Ospite (The Guest)(1971), furthered her interest in social and psychological themes. The plot centers on the relationship between a writer and a woman, a former mental asylum patient struggling to fit back in society. The film, starring Lucia Bose, was made on a shoestring budget. It was shown at the Venice film festival out of competition.

Milarepa (1973)

The director undertook a venture into Oriental mystical experiences with Milarepa (1973). A story inspired in a classic text of Tibetan literature, Milarepa moves back and for in time between the story of the title character, a mystic of the eleventh century and a young westerner whose travails are not very different, both are torn between the search for knowledge and quest for power. The film was praised by Pier Paolo Pasolini who called it a "truly beautiful film".

The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani was not well known beyond Italy until she made The Night Porter (1974) (Il portiere di notte), a film that was a great success arising controversy in art house film's circles. It remains the film for which Cavani is best remembered.

The plot, set in Vienna in 1954, follows a former concentration camp victim, raped and tortured by an SS camp guard. Fifteen years later, she revives the pattern of abuse after encountering the man by chance in a hotel, where he is working under an assumed name as a night porter. A deeply controversial film that attempted to examine sadomasochism, Nazism and Holocaust guilt, it starred Charlotte Rampling, then-unknown, and British actor Dirk Bogarde.

The film received a lot of attention and divided cultures. American critic Roger Ebert called it "despicable," and both major New York critics, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, dismissed it as "junk". However, in Europe, the film was uniformly hailed as a groundbreaking attempt to probe the unsettling sexual and psychological ambiguities generated by war and the exploitation of power following by it.

Beyond Good and Evil (1977)

Three years later, Cavani made Beyond Good and Evil (1977) (Al di là del bene e del male), the film recounts the intense relationship between German philosophizer Friederich Nietzsche, his friend author Paul Ree and Russian writer and feminist Lou Andreas Salomé. They meet in Rome in 1882 and move to Germany in a failed menage a trois while attempting to live their lives and satisfy their intellectual needs rejecting the notions of bourgeois morality. Nietzsche goes mad from a venereal disease and Paul discovers his repressed homosexuality with tragic consequences. Lou, the more liberated of the three, following the banner of of feminism, is the only survivor. The film starring Dominique Sanda, Erland Josephson and Robert Powell was also entangled in controversy.

In 1979, Cavani began directing operas with Wozzeck in Florence; subsequent operas include Iphigenia in Taurus and Medea at the Opera of Paris, 1984, 1986; Cardillac in Florence, 1991; La vestale at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, 1993 or La Cena delle beffe in Zurich, 1995;

The Skin (1981)

Cavani's most ambitious film The Skin (1981)(La pelle) is based on the eponymous novel by Curzio Malaparte . Shown in competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it was aimed at the international market with a cast that includes Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster. Set in Naples in 1944 during World War II during the American occupation, it is a griping tale of survival in the midst of hardship, starvation, depravity and uncertainty.

Beyond the door (1982)

The plot of Beyond the door (1982) Oltre la porta, set in North Africa, follows the love triangle between Mathew, an American oil ring worker in love with Nina, a young woman entangled in an affair with her stepfather Enrico, an Italian diplomat who is in jail for the death of Nina's mother. The film, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Tom Berenger and Eleonora Giorgi disappointed audiences and critics.

The Berlin Affair (1985)

More successful than Cavani's previous film, The Berlin Affair (1985)(Interno berlinese), is loosely based on the novel Quicksand by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. Set in Berlin in 1938, on the verge of war, the film tells the story of a couple who is seduced by the young daughter of the Japanese Ambassador and are dragged into a perverse love triangle.The Berlin Affair continued Cavani's interest in transgressive relationships. It was the third part of her trilogy of films with a German setting that began with The Night Porter and continued with Beyond Good and Evil.

Francesco (1989)

With Francesco (1989) Liliana Cavani returned to the life of St Francis of Assisi in a film starring Mickey Rourke as the title character and Helena Bonham-Carter as Clara. The film, of little stylistically resemblance to Cavani's earlier effort, portrays Francesco's life spent in the name of love and the dedication to others while in a world plagued by violence, despair, misery and suffering.

During the 1990s Liliana Cavani became more interested in staging operas, and devoted less time to filmmaking. Towards the end of the decade, she returned to her television roots and directed two TV movies, Cavalleria rusticana (1996) and Manon Lescaut (1999)

Where Are You? I'm Here (1993)

Where Are You? I'm Here (Dove siete? Io sono qui) (1993), presents a simple narrative, a story of two deaf youngsters, making apparent Cavani's extreme care taken in the direction of her actors. The film, little seen beyond Italy, was shown out of competition at The Venice film festival.

Ripley's Game (2002)

In 2001 Cavani returned to making movies with Ripley's Game (2002) (Il Gioco di Ripley), based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith , a sequel to The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was made into a film in 1999. Ripley’s Game, Cavani's best received film by American critics, gave her a chance to once again work with an international cast, including John Malkovich,,Lena Heady and Ray Winstone. It was presented out of competition at Venice

Filmography as director

Year	English title	Original title	Notes
1966	Francesco d'Assisi	Francesco d'Assisi	Made for television
1968	Galileo	Galileo	Made for television
1969	The Cannibals	I Cannibali
1971	The Guest	L’ospite
1973	Milarepa	Milarepa
1974	The Night Porter	Il portiere di notte
1977	Beyond Good and Evil	Al di là del bene e del male
1981	The Skin	La pelle
1982	Beyond the Door	Oltre la porta
1985	The Berlin Affair	Interno Berlinese	Based on the novel Quicksand by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
1989	Francesco	Francesco
1993	Dove siete? Io sono qui	Dove siete? Io sono qui
2002	Ripley's Game	Il gioco di Ripley	Based on Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
2005	De Gasperi, The man of Hope	De Gasperi, l'uomo della speranza
2008	Einstein	Einstein	Made for television
2012	Un corpo in vendita	Un corpo in vendita

References

• Armstrong, Richard, The Rough Guide to Film: An A-Z of Directors and their movies, Rough Guides, 2007. ISBN 9781843534082
• Bruneta, Gian Piero. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian films from its origins to the twenty first century. Princenton University Press, 2011. ISBN 0-6911-1989-9
• Bonadella, Peter. Italian Cinema: from the Neorealism to the present. Continuum New York, 1988. ISBN 0-8044-6061-2
• Marrone, Gaetana. The Gaze and the Labyrinth: the Cinema of Liliana Cavani. Princenton Paperbacks, 2000. ISBN 0-691-00873-6

External links

• Filmografia di Liliana Cavani
• Liliana Cavani at IMDb