******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(From Jairus Banaji on FB.)
Well-known film stars who are (or were) committed left-wingers are hard
to find. Gian Maria Volonté (1933–1994) was probably the best example of
this rare category. He was often called an “activist” and his political
commitment described as “relentless”. In 1994 shortly after G.M.V. died,
Oreste Scalzone, one of the founders of Potere Operaio who had been
arrested in 1979 and “accused of planning armed attacks and plotting to
overthrow the government”, revealed that it was Volonté who helped him
to escape from Italy, from where he sailed to Corsica on a boat owned by
the actor. (Scalzone later took French citizenship.)
As an actor Volonté was both prolific and immensely creative, choosing
his roles with an indelible sense of the politics behind them—in a
string of overtly political films like We Still Kill the Old Way (Petri,
1967), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Petri, 1970), Sacco &
Vanzetti (Montaldo, 1971), The Mattei Affair (Rosi, 1972), Property is
No Longer Theft (Petri, 1973), Ogro (Pontecorvo, 1979), Christ Stopped
at Eboli (Rosi, 1979), and The Moro Affair (Ferrara, 1986)!
“Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants”, said
Pasolini about his film “Saló”, something many of us in India can
understand perfectly from the past six years or so. It is this theme (of
the anarchy of power) that forms the thread of one of Volonté’s most
powerful roles, the police inspector who murders his lover, implicates
himself in the crime by leaving clues all over the flat, and then
watches to see how his subordinates in the homicide squad investigate
her murder—the story line of Elio Petri’s brilliant thriller
“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” (1970).
Here’s a very short summary of the write-up in the link below. Volonté
worked for major Italian directors from Sergio Leone and his spaghetti
westerns to overtly left-leaning film makers like Francesco Rosi, Elio
Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, Damiano Damiani, and Giuseppe Ferrara. His
performances were “dazzling” and his versatility astonishing. With the
same “rigour and aptitude” he could play a worker as well as a
businessman, an intellectual and a neurotically obsessed police
commissioner, a revolutionary and a man of power. He starred in as many
as four of Petri’s films, because each shared the other’s left-wing
convictions, had a common “predilection for uncomfortable themes” and an
equal drive to portray a country racked by corruption and social
turmoil. The Petri/Volonté partnership was the basis on which Italian
political cinema established its success in the seventies.
“Investigation of a Citizen” would win an academy award in 1971 as the
“best foreign language film”, and Volonté himself would win numerous
Italian awards for his portrayal of the police chief whom his colleagues
referred to simply as “il Dottore”. (The far-left group Lotta Continua
was quick to identify Volonté’s character as the police official Luigi
Calabresi who was widely held to be responsible for the death of the
anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, who, it was said, had “fallen
out” of the fourth floor window of the Milan police headquarters shortly
after being detained towards the middle of December 1969.)
Volonté’s collaboration with Petri would continue, with Investigation
becoming part of a “trilogy of neurosis” in which Petri explores the
pathologies of power, money and work in that order, treating them as the
three pillars of the “newly enriched Italian middle class” that came out
of the economic boom of the 1960s. Volonté was also directed by
Francesco Rosi in several other roles, including that of the
anti-Fascist writer Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), a
Bafta-winning performance based on Levi’s autobiographical account of
his years in exile (in 1935–36) in the impoverished Italian South.
“Although Volonté died quite young (from a heart attack in Greece in
1994, while filming Ulysses’ Gaze...), he also boasts a long list of
films and roles outside Italy. Among these Ogro, shot in 1979, the same
year as Christ Stopped at Eboli. Written and directed by Gillo
Pontecorvo, Ogro was based on true events of Operation Ogre, the name
given by ETA to its assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, Prime Minister
of Spain in 1973. The final film worth mentioning is Il Caso Moro (The
Moro Affair) by Giuseppe Ferrara in 1986, based on the Christian
Democrat secretary’s kidnapping and execution by the Red Brigades. For
this role he won best actor at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986. At the
1991 Venice Film Festival Volonté’s outstanding contribution to European
cinema was loudly proclaimed with a Golden Lion for career achievement.”
https://homemcr.org/article/actor-focus-gian-maria-volonte/
For an Italian video collective seeking to make a full-scale documentary
on G.M.V. (“Forgotten militancy”) , see
https://mobile.ulule.com/dimenticatamilitanza/?lang=en
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
