Some day, someone will put together a family tree of Italian cinema, but for now, let’s just look at some of the career highlights of the directors featured in this AFS series:

  • Federico Fellini got his start as a writer and assistant director on Open City, then on Rossellini’s next film, Paisan. He also wrote and assistant directed for Pietro Germi and Alberto Lattuada before co-directing Variety Lights with Lattuada in 1950.
  • Michelangelo Antonioni, too, got his start with Rossellini, helping to write the wartime drama A Pilot Returns after attending the Centro Sperimentale in 1940. He then directed several short documentaries before collaborating on the script of Fellini’s first solo directorial effort, The White Sheik, in 1951.
  • Pier Paolo Pasolini was still in college during the liberation of Rome, but by 1954, he was writing scripts for such directors as Mario Soldati and Mauro Bolognini. He also co-scripted Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria in 1956.
  • Bernardo Bertolucci was just 21 when he became assistant director on Pasolini’s first film, Accatone. A year later, he directed his first feature, The Grim Reaper.
  • Luchino Visconti is a special case: A Milanese count, born in 1906 into one of the leading aristocratic families of Italy, Visconti went to France in the 1930s, where he learned filmmaking with Jean Renoir and also became an avowed Marxist, despite what Ephraim Katz describes in The Film Encyclopedia as his “aristocratic, almost feudal, private life-style.”

    This article appears in January 19 • 2001.

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