Cecilia Mangini

Cecilia Mangini at the IFFR (2020)

Cecilia Mangini (born July 31, 1927 in Mola di Bari , † January 21, 2021 in Rome ) was an Italian documentary filmmaker , screenwriter and photographer . She is considered the first and most important Italian documentary film director of the post-war period. Mangini often worked with her husband Lino Del Fra , but also other Italian intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini . Her works were always socially critical and communist .

Live and act

Childhood and youth

Mangini's mother was a Florentine , her father came from Apulia and traded in leather. In 1933 - Mangini was six years old - the family left the south of Italy, which had been hard hit by the economic crisis, and moved to Florence . There, like many of her contemporaries, she became an ardent supporter of fascism . She began to be interested in the fine arts and cinema and attended the local "Cinegufs": film circles organized by fascist university groups. Only after the war they discovered the neo-realism and Communism in itself, was a regular visitor of the film clubs of Florence, where he established himself the film club "Controcampo" (in German: reverse shot '). In 1952 she moved to Rome, where she worked for the organization of the Italian film clubs. There she met her future husband, who was also working there, the documentary filmmaker Lino Del Fra.

Career entry as a film critic

Like other Italian filmmakers, including Del Fra, she began her career as a film critic: from the early 1950s she wrote reviews for the left-wing film magazine Cinema Nuovo; she also wrote for Cinema '60 and Eco del cinema. In addition, she also wrote entries for the lexicon "Enciclopedia Cinematografica Conoscere".

photography

Deeply rooted in the world of film, Mangini began among others. to take pictures during filming. In 1952 she traveled to Lipari for her first photo report . There she documented the arduous working conditions and everyday life of workers in a pumice quarry with her Zeiss Super Ikonta 6 × 6 . On Panarea she photographed the daily work of local children e.g. B. when fishing or in tourism. The photographs look like snapshots, but they are carefully composed and already suggest Mangini's proximity to neorealism . Some of them were only published in 2017.

Mangini worked as a photographer until around 1958. Her most important photo report, however, was a piece about the living conditions in Vietnam during the Vietnam War , which only appeared in 1965 in the left-wing L'Espresso and in the feminist magazine Noi donne . She had originally traveled to Vietnam with Lino Del Fra for a film project. However, the two had to leave the country after four months because of the growing hostilities; the film was never made.

According to her own statement, Mangini ended her career as a photographer after her son Luca was born.

Film direction

In the mid-1950s, Mangini took part in an ethnographic film project directed by the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino . At the end of the 1950s, producer Fulvio Lucisano gave her the idea of making documentaries. So she began to make her first short films in what was then a predominantly male professional environment. It documented the life of people on the edge of society, the desolate suburbs and the last remnants of pre-industrial traditions in the countryside. Pier Paolo Pasolini worked as a writer on some of these films : Ignoti alla città and La Canta delle Marane are inspired by his first novel Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and deal with the lives of young people in the Roman suburbs. In Stendalì , grieving women in Mangini's homeland Apulia are shown speaking Griko , a local minority language with Greek elements. Mangini herself described the collaboration with the controversial author and the anger with the censorship that she had because of a scene in Ignoti as a career springboard .

In the early 1960s, Mangini, Del Fra and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché together made the found footage film All'armi siam fascisti! ('To arms, we are fascists!'). Historical scenes from the period between 1911 and 1961 were assembled from existing film material, with the aim of exploring the phenomenon of fascism. These scenes were linked by an often sarcastic commentary spoken by Franco Fortini . The film struggled with censorship for months. In advance, the Istituto Luce , Italy's largest archive for documentaries, had refused to provide material. The filmmakers had therefore worked with non-Italian archives. After All'armi siam fascisti! premiered at the Venice Film Festival , it was put back on hold by the censors and could only be brought out after some back and forth. At a performance in Rome, neo-fascists stormed the cinema. Nonetheless, the film became a box office hit and reviews highlighted its historical value.

After this success Mangini, Del Fra and Fortini tried to deal critically with the myth of Stalin in a film that was also to be based on archive material. Mangini, who in contrast to Del Fra was not a member of the socialist party, was able to travel to the USA and collected rare film material there, e.g. B. from the Library of Congress , from the archives of Fox and Paramount and from the Museum of Modern Art . However, since the producer, Lucisano, had extensive editing changes made to adapt the film to the US market, the filmmakers withdrew their authorship. The film, which Lucisano finally released under the title Processo a Stalin in 1963, was a flop.

In the mid-1960s, Mangini was commissioned by the Rai to carry out research, which ultimately resulted in the documentary Essere Donne : She traveled - supported by the Communist Party - all over Italy to show the living and working conditions of women. In doing so, she made their discrimination and lower pay visible, as well as their difficulties in reconciling family and work. Here, too, she worked with found footage and collages . In this project, too, Mangini had problems with an authority, probably because the image of women conveyed was not acceptable: The film was therefore not allowed to be shown in Italian cinemas. It was only shown in Germany at meeting places of the Communist Party, but was shown at the Krakow Film Festival in 1965 and received the Special Jury Prize at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival that same year . In 2019 it was restored by the Cineteca Bologna.

In 1977 the film Antonio Gramsci - The Years in Dungeon , directed by Lino Del Fra and co-written by Mangini, won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival . In fact, Gramsci and his writings are important to Mangini and her understanding of film. She herself stated in an interview that Gramsci's work was the ideological basis for her films.

In 1982 Mangini filmed together with her husband and again on behalf of the Rai Comizi d'amore '80 : An inventory of the sexuality of the Italian population, 20 years after Pasolini's documentation Gastmahl der Liebe (original title: Comizi d'amore ). As the production and financing of documentary films in Italy became increasingly difficult, she then took a long filmic creative break.

The now 82-year-old Mangini only ended this break in 2009 when she worked with the young filmmaker Mariangela Barbanente: In viaggio con Cecilia , the two traveled through their common home in Apulia and documented the changes in the region in the course of industrialization since the post-war period. In the same year a retrospective of Mangini's films was shown at the NododocFest in Trieste .

A few years later she worked again in tandem with a young filmmaker: Together with Paolo Pisanelli, she made the documentaries Le Vietnam sera libre (2018) and Due scatole dimenticate - un viaggio in Vietnam (2020). It deals with Mangini's and Lino Del Fra's trip to Vietnam in the 1960s, Mangini's photographs that were taken there, and the film project that was never realized.

Since 2019 Mangini has been working, again with Paolo Pisanelli, on a documentary about the only Italian woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature , Grazia Deledda .

Cecilia Mangini died in Rome in January 2021 at the age of 93.

Collaboration with Lino Del Fra

Mangini had a symbiotic working relationship with her husband until his death in 1997. It is sometimes difficult to determine where the work of one ends and that of the other begins. Mangini's son Luca Del Fra describes the common home as a workshop in which scripts were rewritten many times together and apparently trivialities were discussed for a long time.

Filmography

As a director

• Ignoti alla città (1958), short film
• Maria ei giorni (1959)
• Firenze di Pratolini (1959)
• La canta delle Marane (1960), short film
• Stendalì - Suonano ancora (1960), short film
• La passione del grano (1960), together with Lino del Fra
• Fata Morgana (1961), together with Lino del Fra
• All'armi, siam fascisti! (1962), together with Lino Del Fra and Lino Micciché
• La statua di Stalin (1963), documentary short film, together with Lino Del Fra
• Divino Amore (1963)
• Trieste del mio cuore (1964)
• Pugili a Brugherio (1965)
• Tommaso (1965)
• Felice Natale (1965)
• Eat donne (1965)
• Brindisi '66 (1966)
• Domani vincerò (1969)
• La briglia sul collo (1974)
• In viaggio con Cecilia, together with Mariangela Barbanente (2013)
• Le Vietnam sera libre, together with Paolo Pisanelli (2018)
• Due scatole dimenticate - un viaggio in Vietnam, together with Paolo Pisanelli (2020)

As a screenwriter

• Stendalì - Suonano ancora (1960)
• All'armi, siam fascisti! (1962)
• La statua di Stalin (1963)
• La torta in cielo, directed by Lino Del Fra (1970)
• La villeggiatura, directed by Marco Leto (1973)
• Antonio Gramsci, The Years in Dungeon, directed by Lino Del Fra (1977)
• Clone, directed by Lino Del Fra (1994)
• Regina Coeli, directed by Nico D'Alessandria (2000)
• In viaggio con Cecilia (2013)

Awards

In 2009 Mangini was awarded the Solinas Prize and the Medal of the President of the Republic of Italy for her long service as a filmmaker.

Web links

• Cecilia Mangini in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Viennale Memories: Cecilia Mangini V'19 on YouTube , accessed on July 2, 2020 (interview with Mangini, conducted by Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Addio a Cecilia Mangini, regista e documentarista, madrina del Cinema del reale. In: Nuovo Quottidiano di Puglia. Retrieved January 22, 2021 (Italian). 
2. ^ ^{A b} Claudia Lenssen: Work is the hard life. In: Der Tagesspiegel. February 4, 2016, accessed August 30, 2020 . 
3. ^ ^{A b} Anne-Violaine Houcke: Cecilia Mangini, agitateur culturel. In: Critikat. April 26, 2011, accessed September 1, 2020 (French). 
4. ↑ Omaggio a Cecilia Mangini. In: SalinaDocFest. September 23, 2014, accessed September 1, 2020 (Italian). 
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Elisabetta Povoledo: A Legendary Documentary Maker Closes 'an Open Wound' . In: The New York Times . January 24, 2020, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com ).
6. ^ Marco Pistoia: Cinema Nuovo. In: Treccani. 2003, accessed August 30, 2020 (Italian). 
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Dalila Missero: Cecilia Mangini - A Counterhegemonic Experience of Cinema. In: Feminist Media Histories, Volume 2, Issue 3. University of California Press, 2016, accessed August 30, 2020 . 
8. ^ Il capolavoro del cinema perduto e ritrovato. In: Resto al Sud. July 23, 2013, accessed September 1, 2020 (Italian). 
9. ↑ Cecilia Mangini. Isole, un viaggio a Panarea e Lipari. In: Arte.it. 2017, accessed August 30, 2020 (Italian). 
10. ^ Concita de Gregorio: Un mistero grande nelle cose piccole. In: la Repubblica. June 9, 2016, accessed September 16, 2020 (Italian). 
11. ↑ ^{a b c d} Cecilia Mangini e Lino Del Fra. In: Fondo Cecilia Mangini - Lino Del Fra. Cineteca Bologna, accessed September 6, 2020 (Italian). 
12. ↑ Ignoti alla città. In: Viennale. Retrieved September 6, 2020 (English). 
13. ↑ All'armi siam fascisti! In: Fondazione Archivio Audiovisio del Movimento Operaio e Democratico. Retrieved September 8, 2020 (Italian). 
14. ↑ All'armi siam fascisti. In: Movieday. Retrieved September 8, 2020 (Italian). 
15. ^ Addio a Lino Del Fra, il regista che amava le fiabe e l'impegno. In: La Repubblica. July 21, 1997, accessed September 14, 2020 (Italian). 
16. ↑ Zoé Rogez: “Essere donne” di Cecilia Mangini. Storia di un boicottaggio. In: Cinefilia Ritrovata. Cineteca di Bologna, June 25, 2019, accessed September 16, 2020 (Italian). 
17. ↑ Nicola Bellantuono: Cecilia Mangini, la grande Molese, compie 90 anni. In: Città Nostra. August 1, 2017, accessed September 23, 2020 (Italian). 
18. ^ In viaggio con Cecilia. In: Ischia Film Festival. Retrieved September 25, 2020 (English). 
19. ↑ ^{a b} Mangini Cecilia. In: SIUSA Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche. Retrieved September 15, 2020 (Italian). 
20. ↑ Cecilia Cristiani: Cecilia Mangini e il Vietnam. In: Cinefilia Ritrovata. Cineteca di Bologna, March 5, 2019, accessed September 3, 2020 (Italian). 
21. ^ Grazia Deledda - Cecilia Mangini lavora a un docufilm. In: CinemaItaliano.info. March 29, 2019, accessed September 21, 2020 (Italian). 
22. ^ Antonella Gaeta: Addio a Cecilia Mangini, la prima documentarista d'Italia: aveva 93 anni. "Era la donna rock del cinema". In: La Repubblica. January 22, 2021, accessed January 22, 2021 (Italian). 
23. ^ Firenze di Pratolini. In: Docucity. Università degli Studi di Milano, accessed on September 6, 2020 (Italian). 
24. ↑ Two Forgotten Boxes - A trip to Vietnam (Due scatole dimenticate - Un viaggio in vietnam) - 2020 - documentaries - films & docu. In: Luce Cinecittá. Retrieved September 2, 2020 (Italian).