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A lucid review of the filmography of a twentieth-century world cinematography genius: Ettore Scola (1931-2016), author, among many other notable works, of ‘Ugly, dirty and bad’ (1976), ‘A particular journey’ (1977), ‘El baile’ (1984), ‘La noche de Varennes’ (1985),’ Pasión de amor ‘(1986),’ Splendor ‘(1989) and’ How strange to be called Federico !: Scola tells Fellini ‘, a great storyteller who knew how to “look into the eyes and listen”.
If Ettore Scola was so interested in listening to people, it would be because he was born in the commune of Trevico in Avelino, a mountainous town in Campania about two hours from Naples, in southern Italy, where talking and remembering was the only distraction to hand. Even in its most libidinal days, the municipality, whose largest building was the church, was not populated by 2,000 souls. When Scola was born, according to records, there were 1,700. Today there are fewer.
By the time Scola was born there, on May 10, 1931, it had been a decade since Mussolini’s National Fascist Party had grouped the Fasci Italianni as a party, winning their first elections. For nine, the Duce was the first – and only – Italian minister, protected by the infamous squadrons of black shirts and by the Great Council of Fascism. The night had been long and bitter; meanwhile, nearby republics like Spain and Germany were rusting day by day with the same stench of boots and crosses.
Unlike Fellini’s native Rimini, where there were already four cinemas before the war, in Scola’s Avelino the first project seems to have taken several years to arrive. Perhaps that is why, while Fellini’s first love was pure imagery, for Scola it was the long afternoons of people talking, laughing, remembering and shouting, which fill his best films.
In larger cities such as Milan, Turin or Rome, where theaters were already a common temple for the 1930s, Italian cinema had already taken root through silent and spectacular epics about imperial pasts, such as Cabiria (1914) the The fall of Troy (1911) by Pastrone, ¿Quo Vadis? (1915) by Guazzoni o The last days of Pompeii (1913) by Caserini and Rodolfi, who had paid much to nostalgia for past glories. Fascism can be explained as a mixture of that longing with interwar misery; For cinema, it was the same dictatorship that founded Cineccitá, first as a Hollywood of propaganda and, years later, home to Ettore Scola’s workshop for young filmmakers. Between one thing and another, Italy turned over, got up and rolled over more than once for reasons as different as football or war. It was his most turbulent and unpredictable century and Scola, one of its best chroniclers.
With each new national spasm, from the fascist collapse to the rise of Berlusconi, Scola was there to register the gaze of dozens of characters who would be anonymous and invisible if he, an effective narrator with a good ear, had not elevated them to that popular Olympus that It is the great cinema about little people, and that is only available to filmmakers who wear their shoes to go out to look for stories on the streets. That’s what Scola did; I found stories where no one was looking for them, on terraces or rooftops, in family shacks on the shabby periphery, in trattorias at midnight or in small rooms in the Roman neighborhood. Sober in their execution and on camera, Scola’s films have their backbone in dialogue, situations and discreet gestures.
Although Scola was eleven years younger than Fellini, one would have to rely on the memory recreated by the former at the beginning of How strange to be called Federico! (How strange to be called Federico !, 2013) to find out how they met, in the postwar period at the end of the forties, through the weekly Marc ‘Aurelio, where Fellini had been a monero and Scola, a few years later, a journalist. Provincials in Rome and sure of being able to eat the world, they entered the Roman film industry around 1950, when Fellini was preparing his debut film (Variety Lights, 1950) and Scola fulfilled assignments as script assistant and dialogue writer, while participating in hot debates of ideas after screenings by Rossellini, De Sica, Zampa or De Santis.
The three fevers of Italian cinema
Italian cinema I was hot from three fevers: the neorealism, the industrial all’italiana comedy and that of the episode films, which by means of three or four short films directed by filmmakers of good trade, brought together the largest possible number of stars of the moment –Alberto Sordi, Anna Maria Ferrero, Sandra Milo, Ugo Tognazzi– with you look to choke the respectable with an accumulation of handsome faces and light arguments.
There was a lot of work on the forums in Rome, in which several films were filmed at different times at different times and the scripts were signed by teams of three, four or eight librettists working piecemeal. This is the only way to explain that since 1950 and until he was thirty-two years old in 1963 – the year in which he directed his first feature film – Ettore Scola had already co-written more than forty collaborative librettos and some more like ghost writer or with a pseudonym, at the rate of four or five per year.
It is likely that this collaborative spirit, rare in filmmakers-authors, so jealous of their arguments, gave him the necessary trade to write without misgivings alongside collaborators such as Furio Scarpelli, Ruggero Maccari, Agenore Incrocci – all sanctified by the Oscar – but also from his wife, the filmmaker Gigliola Fantoni or his daughters Paola and Silvia Scola, who were the first dialogue supervisors of A particular day (Una giornatta particolare, 1977) and they ended up being co-writers and directors of the second unit; as he said in an interview, “in writing there is no authority or hierarchy.” That, perhaps, is the secret of the Scola method for storytellers: s/ Go to page 10
aber look into the eyes and listen.
Scola’s filmic mutations
If we had to ordering Ettore Scola’s filmography in more or less homogeneous stages, it would be necessary to separate a period of learning during the sixties, from six or seven films made to order, necessity or for the mere desire to learn. They are efficient vehicles for showing off stars like Vittorio Gassman, Sordi or Tognazzi. In them his team of regular collaborators was formed, among them the composer Armando Trovaioli who, although little named, did for Scola what Nino Rota for Fellini or Morricone for Leone: for more than forty years, he turned his librettos into opera.
With the arrival of Marcello Mastroianni to his casts, something changed. The demon of jealousy (Drama of Jealousy: all the details in the news, 1970) with Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and Giancarlo Giannini, fue estrenada en México como Italian-style jealousy at the 1st International Film Festival, which in all probability was the first Scola film to be seen in the country. But its deepest mutation is in Trevico-Turin: Journey into the Fiat Nam (1972), a social chronicle that is the first of his offerings to the neorealism of his teachers. The protagonist is a teenager, Fortunato, who comes from Avelino, Scola’s home region, and arrives in Turin to face sour life in a big city where southern migrants only fit in if they accept to live with their heads down.
From there there is no turning back: he is a narrator with an increasingly firm pulse and expansive gaze who, during the seventies, dedicated himself to recreating the recent memory of Italy through a gallery of characters born not only of his commitment. humanist, but deeply curious about human comedy in all its diversity, from monsters to tiny heroes. The rest of that decade was spent in developing a mural made up of three choral vignettes: We loved each other so much (We had loved each other so much, 1974), Ugly, dirty and bad (Ugly dirty and bad, 1976) and The terrace (The terrace, 1980). Seen as a triptych, they form the garden of delights of a swarm-society where perfidy and the sublime meet, the abject with the ideal and dirt with tenderness. In them, in addition, he perfected a technique that he would reuse in The dance (Prom, 1983), The night of Varennes (The New World, 1982) the Dinner (1998) and that consists of encapsulating the zeitgeist of an era through a closed space: a ship, an apartment, a terrace, a restaurant. In all cases, if no one leaves there, it is because the whole of Italy fits there.
In the middle of that decade, on the morning of November 2, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was assassinated with a brutality that summed up the underground tensions that kept –and keep– Italy divided. According to the documentary Laughing and joking (2015) directed by his daughters, Scola and Pasolini would have worked on a collaborative project, Ugly, dirty and bad, which sought to marry Scola’s social compassion with Pasolini’s iconoclastic verism, who was to direct it from a script by Scola and Maccari. It was the portrait of a marginalized family that, far from moving towards empathy, responded well to the adjectives in the title. Overcome the shock of the crime, Scola decided to carry it out with Nino Manfredi in the role of an infamous, one-eyed and despicable patriarch.
In the middle of three, it is A particular day, 1977. If the others win by accumulation, this part of an almost theatrical nudity: two people, an apartment, a roof with clothes hanging and a single day, which is not special because Hitler visits Rome and is received with splendor, but because two lonely ones find friendship by accident or necessity, when the whole country danced on the edge of the abyss. He (Marcelo Mastroianni) is a segregated writer and she (Sophia Loren), a Neapolitan whose embers of vital impetus were reduced to ashes by a bitter marriage. Next to Enemy, dear enemy (Unfair competition, 2001), the day was Scola’s only direct approach to fascism, but the vibratto The human sense of his political commitment resonates throughout his later work.
A particular day it could be seen in Mexico at the ix International Film Festival in spring 1978, at that time in the Roble de Reforma cinema and in the Fernando de Fuentes room of the old Cineteca. Scola’s films were common at the Show, which scheduled The dance in 1984, The night of Varennes in 1985 – two months after the September earthquakes – Passion of love in ’86, Splendor in ’89 and so on until How strange to be called Federico !: Scola tells Fellini, which was his last film at the 56th Show in 2014.
Although he lived three more years with written scripts and films on the doorstep, Scola publicly resigned to co-produce with any company related to Silvio Berlusconi, that nemesis to whose combat he dedicated his last strength. In one of his last interviews, he regretted that young Italian filmmakers embraced proven formulas and gave up on counting the country in which they lived. A filmmaker with a popular roots and accustomed to filming for ordinary spectators, he did not stop lamenting the elitist secrecy of certain auteur cinema, made with his back to the audience: “I don’t believe in catacomb cinema that is dedicated to a sect of few chosen. Making a movie is a very big fatigue for that ”, he is seen saying in an interview for Italian television in his later years. Cheers to Ettore Scola, who would have turned 90 this month as the youngest filmmaker in Italy.
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