Citto Maselli, a great committed director, has died: he was 92 years old – Corriere.it

I have an ambition that I have never revealed to anyone, not even myself. that of being forgotten as a director and rediscovered, instead, as a photographer. He confessed it to Paese sera in 1981 (the most horribly sincere thing he has ever said), when he was about to show his Polaroids at the Porretta Terme festival and before directing for television Adventure of a photographer (from the story by Italo Calvino). Yet, on closer inspection, Francesco Maselli, who died in Rome at the age of 92 (he was born there on December 9, 1930), has always been a photographer, because his films and his equally important political activity have always tried to fix the reality that pulsated around him, even to stop it because he was interested in highlighting all the elements that made it up, rather than narrating its evolution and dialectic. Thus ending up suffocating the throbs and impulses of his works, to isolate the themes, messages, values.

Baptized by his uncle Luigi Pirandello, son of an art critic who opened the house to the intellectual and progressive Roman world (Bontempelli, Savinio, Alvaro, Cecchi), Citto – da Francesco – Maselli demonstrates surprising precocity in everything: at the age of seven he knows Hamlet by heart ; at thirteen, during the German occupation, he brings arms and food to the partisans of the Gap, committing himself to the Italian Students Union and thus succeeding, at only fourteen, in joining the PCI. After making two short films with surreal tones, he was accepted at the Experimental Center of Cinematography at the age of seventeen: in 1949 the documentary Bagnaia, Italian country awarded in Venice, the following year he collaborated with Antonioni on the screenplay for Cchronicle of a love and in ’52 to that of The lady without camellias. The directorial debut of 1953, with Story of Catherineepisode of Love in the cityand in 1955, at the age of twenty-five, he made his first feature filmThe drifters, which gets a special mention at the Venice Film Festival. Building the film on the theme of individual responsibilities in the face of the Resistance, Maselli here begins to address the theme of class consciousness and the moral crisis of the bourgeoisie which will also be at the center of the following The dolphins (1960), where the unrealistic ambitions of a group of young people will end up giving in to the flattery and compromises of their fathers, and The indifferent (1964) where Moravia’s novel serves him to underline the eternal vices of a class that seems incapable of coming to terms with history (the film is set in the 1920s, after the first two were respectively in the 1940s and 1950s).

In between was failure Of The woman of the day (1958, the story of a model who accepts any compromise to make a career), but the debt that the director-screenwriter owes to a Marxist interpretation of reality is already evident, which ends up imprisoning the characters in his films and making them above all cases and examples capable of illustrating his ideas. His militancy, however, in the mid-1960s seems to slacken, yielding to a series of lucrative advertising contracts for Perugina, Buitoni and Peroni (his Caroselli with Terence Hill and Solvi Stubing: Call me Peroni, it will be your beer!) and at flattery of comedy. But while harshly attacked by left-wing critics, Hurry up and kill me… I’m cold! (1967) and Steal from your neighbor… (1968) pursue an unchanged ideological creed – stigmatizing the power of money which kills feelings or conformism which annihilates the desire for freedom – even if they use the forms of paradox and allegory (and, the former, has the evident ambition to quote Lubitsch and his competent Mancia).

Poor box office performance of the two films and a more general rethinking of his own role and commitment (to which the decision to go into analysis is not extraneous) bring Maselli back to political militancy, close to the Ingraian left: he enters the secretariat of the PCI Cinema Commission, secretary of the Anac (l ‘association of cinematographic authors) and is committed to the renewal of the Venice Biennale, becoming a councilor, even if his permanent cultural ennobling plan will never be implemented. The first effect of this return to commitment Open letter to an evening paper (1970), where he stigmatizes the impotence of the intellectual in the face of the real challenges of the revolution (in this case, the struggle in Vietnam), which will follow in ’75 The suspicion of Francesco Maselli – to avoid confusion with The suspect by Hitchcock – where the anti-fascist struggle of a militant exiled in France in 1934 becomes a reflection on the Stalinist temptations of the PCI but also in praise of the commitment ready to sacrifice of s.

After a long television parenthesis (the screenplay Three workers in the 80’s, Adventure of a photographer three years later, the investigation The Fabulous Sixties in 1985), Maselli returns to the cinema with four films centered on the role of women and her superiority, where psychoanalysis seems to take the leading role that Marxism had had: Love story (1986, which made Valeria Golino win her first Coppa Volpi), Private code (1988, with only Ornella Muti on stage), The secret e The sunrise (both from 1990 and both starring Nastassja Kinski). With Chronicles of the third millennium (1996), the director returns to political themes – the threatened demolition of an apartment building drives the tenants to mobilize, even if the results are contradictory – but slips into a complacent and unproductive aestheticism. The praise of commitment still at the heart of The mate (from Pavese, for TV, 1999) and that of those who are marginalized in Civic 0 (2007) while Fragments of the twentieth century (2005) and The red shadows (2009) try to take stock of their life and their role as an intellectual, sometimes with sincere self-critical accents, as if to close a circle opened by an Open Letter forty years earlier.