Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - The Centennial of Tonino Guerra, 1920–2020, Jan 2023

2020 was the centennial anniversary not just of Federico Fellini, but of fellow Romagnol Tonino Guerra, whose name is often associated with Fellini but who has been significantly underappreciated in Italian film scholarship. This Special Issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (JICMS) seeks to help redress the lack of attention given to Guerra work. He is best known in the English-speaking world for his screenwriting, especially with Michelangelo Antonioni and Fellini, and since JICMS is a film journal, the issue centres on his film work while also contextualizing it in terms of his importance as novelist, fabulist, poet and visual and installation artist. Special attention is paid to Guerra’s ecological sensibility and his fusing of local and global in a profound sense of place that is evident not only in his later artwork but in the films for which he wrote.

In this wide-ranging interview, Lora Guerra talks of her meeting and marrying Tonino Guerra; of Guerra’s relationship to Russia, Lora’s homeland; of Tonino and Lora’s relationships with Michelangelo and Enrica Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky, among many others; of Guerra’s international interests beyond Russia; of his favourite writers; his years in Rome and his move back (with Lora) to Romagna in the 1980s; his methods of collaboration with different directors; his environmentalism, particularly in his later years; the nature of his art and vision – ‘peasant’ despite its cosmopolitanism.

This article will investigate aspects of a little studied but key figure in Italian cinema, Tonino Guerra, focusing on his debut as a film screenwriter. The article employs a comparative approach, relating the first poetic and narrative works of Guerra of the 1940s to his first steps as a film scriptwriter of the 1950s, with his fruitful collaborations with directors such as Aglauco Casadio, Giuseppe De Santis and Michelangelo Antonioni. I rely on unpublished materials such as Guerra’s private writings and correspondence (in particular, with his friend and future colleague Federico Fellini) and then analyse the critical reception of the first cinematographic works of Guerra by film magazines active in the 1950s. My readings and analyses will be directed towards establishing the importance of Guerra in post-war Italian society and culture, particularly as he gravitated towards work in the cinema, and the role of that work in the complex transition from neorealism to auteur cinema.

The following interviews address Tonino Guerra’s poetry, fiction, installations and screenwriting, with special attention to his environmentalism, his work with Elio Petri, his novel L’uomo parallelo (1969) in relation to his and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), his love for popular culture and his ‘anarchism’.

Amidst a suffocating drought, a young, cloistered nun, Angela, experiences desires that draw her out of her convent to adventures, including a tarantella and collective sexual experience of dubious consent, that unsettle her and seem to reorient her relationship to Christ, direct her attention to the Madonna and ask the latter to end the drought in a prayer that is apparently answered.

One of the first critical approaches to a text upon which Tonino Guerra was working until days before his death in 2012, this commentary addresses the poetic dimension of Guerra’s film treatment, his ethical and ecological concerns, the sacred role of rain and water, the importance of interconnectedness and (non-institutional) spirituality and a rape scene that raises significant issues in terms of gender and women’s agency.

Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) (1970), Il gatto a nove code (The Cat O’ Nine Tails) (1971) and 4 mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) (1971) comprised his Animal Trilogy. The films were not about animals, though they did play roles, and in Argento scholarship, animals are noted tangentially, but emphasis is always on the human. Meanwhile, anthrozoological film analyses usually examine movies with foregrounded animal protagonists. This article remedies those absences by making an anthrozoological analysis of Argento’s Animal Trilogy, demonstrating that Argento’s presentation of non-human animals is conflicted in the same way that the broader human relationship with animals is conflicted. Animals are both depicted realistically in the various forms of human contact with them and presented in bizarre, outsized ways fitting the pulp giallo form.

In this exclusive conversation, MYmovies.it founder and CEO Gianluca Guzzo sits down with Antonio Falduto, Glen Bonnici, Jim Carter and Flavia Laviosa to discuss his business, which is part online cinema magazine and part streaming platform. Guzzo gives an historical overview of the development of MYmovies.it before turning to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, during which the website pioneered a digital service for replicating the in-person film festival experience. This history serves as a jumping-off point for a series of reflections on the future of film festivals, the distribution of Italian cinema domestically and internationally and the need to promote quality, independent productions. In contrast to most commentators published in this journal, Guzzo speaks as a businessperson who is concerned with marketing Italian cinema in the world, including the use of data for commercial purposes.

Review of: Ugo Casiraghi e Glauco Viazzi: Il cervello di Carné: Letterario 1941–1943, Simone Dotto and Andrea Mariani (eds) (2021)

Milan: La Nave di Teseo, 536 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-89395-104-3, p/bk, €25.00