The Birth of Italian Cinema

I put together a quick list of films I'd recommend to someone interested in seeing the work of filmmakers who were born in Italy during the industry's foundation years. I applied certain parameters to limit my time spent, so there's no films from major industry figures like Aldo Lado or Romano Scavolini (born in Croatia), Alfredo Rizzo or Giorgio Capitani (both from France), Riccardo Freda (Egypt), Vittorio De Sisti (Libya), Nando Cicero (Eritrea), many others. It was nice to think about Italian filmmakers though, and this includes those absent from my list. I only looked at directors born before the end of the 2nd World War in order to curtail the Italian cinema timeline. Such lists can easily become all-consuming and take ages putting together, so on my part, it was just for fun ... but I also picked out a movie for each director (in some cases I've only seen one movie from said director which made the choice easier lol).

01. Giuseppe De Liguoro (10 January 1869 – 19 March 1944) – ‘Dante’s Inferno’ (1911, L'Inferno)
02. Adolfo Padovan (11 November 1869 – 13 July 1930) – ‘Homer’s Odyssey’ (1911, L'Odissea)
03. Giovanni Pastrone (13 September 1883 - 27 June 1959) – ‘The Fire’ (1916, Il fuoco)
04. Febo Mari (18 January 1884 - 6 June 1939) – ‘Ashes’ (1917, Cenere)
05. Guido Brignone (6 December 1886 – 6 March 1959) – ‘Maciste In Hell’ (1925, Maciste all'inferno)
06. Gennaro Righelli (12 December 1886 – 6 January 1949) – ‘Cainà’ (1922)
07. Anton Giulio Bragaglia (11 February 1890 - 15 July 1960) – ‘Thais’ (1917)
08. Mario Mattòli (30 November 1898 – 26 February 1980) – ‘Schoolgirl Diary’ (1941, Ore 9: Lezione di chimica)
09. Alessandro Blasetti (3 July 1900 – 1 February 1987) – ‘Four Steps In The Clouds’ (1942, Quattro passi fra le nuvole)
10. Camillo Mastrocinque (11 May 1901 – 23 April 1969) – ‘Toto, Peppino, And The Hussy’ (1956, Totò, Peppino e la... malafemmina)
11. Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 – 13 November 1974) – ‘Umberto D.’ (1952)
12. Luigi Zampa (2 January 1905 – 16 August 1991) – ‘Girls Of Today’ (1955, Ragazze d'oggi)
13. Roberto Rossellini (8 May 1906 – 3 June 1977) – ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945, Roma città aperta)
14. Luchino Visconti (2 November 1906 – 17 March 1976) – ‘White Nights’ (1957, Le notti bianche)
15. Giorgio Ferroni (12 April 1908 – 17 August 1981) – ‘Night Of The Devils’ (1972, La notte dei diavoli)
16. Michelangelo Antonioni (29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) – ‘Red Desert’ (1964, Il deserto rosso)
17. Renato Castellani (4 September 1913 - 28 December 1985) – ‘Ghosts, Italian Style’ (1967, Questi fantasmi)
18. Marino Girolami (1 February 1914 – 20 February 1994) – ‘Desirable Teacher’ (1981, Pierino contro tutti)
19. Demofilo Fidani (8 February 1914 – 1 March 1994) – ‘The Professor Of Languages’ (1975, La professoressa di lingue)
20. Mario Bava (31 July 1914 – 27 April 1980) – ‘The Whip And The Body’ (1963, La frusta e il corpo)
21. Pietro Germi (14 September 1914 – 5 December 1974) – ‘Seduced And Abandoned’ (1964, Sedotta e abbandonata)
22. Alberto Lattuada (13 November 1914 – 3 July 2005) – ‘Anna’ (1951)
23. Stefano ‘Steno’ Vanzina (19 January 1915 – 13 March 1988) – ‘Toto In Madrid’ (1959, Totò, Eva e il pennello proibito)
24. Mario Monicelli (16 May 1915 – 29 November 2010) – ‘Big Deal On Madonna Street’ (1958, I soliti ignoti)
25. Domenico Paolella (18 October 1915 - 7 October 2002) – ‘Story Of A Cloistered Nun’ (1973, Storia di una monaca di clausura)
26. Luigi Comencini (8 June 1916 – 6 April 2007) – ‘The Museum Of Dreams’ (1950, Il museo dei sogni)
27. Dino Risi (23 December 1916 – 7 June 2008) – ‘The Easy Life’ (1962, Il sorpasso)
28. Sergio Grieco (13 January 1917 – 30 March 1982) – ‘The Sinful Nuns Of St. Valentine’ (1974, Le scomunicate di San Valentino)
29. Giuseppe De Santis (11 February 1917 – 16 May 1997) – ‘Under The Olive Tree’ (1950, Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi)
30. Massimo Dallamano (17 April 1917 – 4 November 1976) – ‘What Have You Done To Solange?’ (1972, Cosa avete fatto a Solange?)
31. Giulio Petroni (21 September 1917 – 31 January 2010) – ‘Do Not Commit Adultery’ (1971, Non commettere atti impuri)
32. Antonio Pietrangeli (19 January 1919 - 12 July 1968) – ‘The Visit’ (1963, La visita)
33. Franco Rossi (19 April 1919, Florence - 5 June 2000) – ‘The Dolls’ (1965, Le bambole)
34. Gillo Pontecorvo (19 November 1919 – 12 October 2006) - ‘The Battle Of Algiers’ (1966, La battaglia di Algeri)
35. Federico Fellini (20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) – ‘Nights Of Cabiria’ (1957, Le notti di Cabiria)
36. Giuseppe Bennati (4 January 1921 – 27 September 2006) – ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ (1974, L'assassino ha riservato nove poltrone)
37. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (26 February 1921 – 15 December 2005) – ‘The Trap’ (1985, La Gabbia)
38. Sergio Sollima (17 April 1921 – 1 July 2015) – ‘Face To Face’ (1967, Faccia a faccia)
39. Renato Polselli (24 February 1922 – 1 October 2006) – ‘The Reincarnation Of Isabel’ (1973, Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel trecento...)
40. Pier Paolo Pasolini ( 5 March 1922 – 2 November 1975) – ‘The Hawks And The Sparrows’ (1966, Uccellacci e uccellini)
41. Flavio Mogherini (25 March 1922 – 23 April 1994) – ‘The Pyjama Girl Case’ (1977, La ragazza dal pigiama giallo)
42. Carlo Lizzani (3 April 1922 – 5 October 2013) – ‘The Violent Four’ (1968, Banditi a Milano)
43. Mauro Bolognini (28 June 1922 – 14 May 2001) – ‘Arabella’ (1967)
44. Damiano Damiani (23 July 1922 – 7 March 2013) – ‘A Genius, Two Partners And A Dupe’ (1975, Un genio, due compari, un pollo)
45. Franco Brusati (4 August 1922 – 28 February 1993) – ‘Bread And Chocolate’ (1974, Pane e cioccolata)
46. Luciano Salce (25 September 1922 – 17 December 1989) – ‘The Beautiful Country’ (1977, Il... Belpaese)
47. Francesco Rosi (15 November 1922 – 10 January 2015) – ‘Hands Over The City’ (1963, Le mani sulla città)
48. Franco Zeffirelli (12 February 1923 - ) – ‘Romeo And Juliet’ (1968, Romeo e Giulietta)
49. Roberto Mauri (official records suggest birth year as 1924 – 12 November 2007) – ‘The Slaughter Of The Vampires’ (1964, La strage dei vampire)
50. Emilio Miraglia (official records suggest birth year as 1924 - ) – ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ (1972, La dama rossa uccide sette volte)
51. Paolo Heusch (26 February 1924 – 16 October 1982) – ‘Werewolf In A Girls’ Dormitory’ (1962, Lycanthropus)
52. Giuseppe Vari (9 March 1924 – 1 October 1993) – ‘Sister Emanuelle’ (1977, Suor Emanuelle)
53. Giulio Questi (18 March 1924 – 3 December 2014) – ‘Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!’ (1967, Se sei vivo spara)
54. Sergio Bergonzelli (25 August 1924 - 24 September 2002) – ‘In The Folds Of The Flesh’ (1970, Nelle pieghe della carne)
55. Armando Crispino (18 October 1924 – 6 October 2003) – ‘Autopsy’ (1975, Macchie solari)
56. Brunello Rondi (26 November 1924 – 7 November 1989) – ‘The Demon’ (1963, Il demonio)
57. Andrea Bianchi (March 31, 1925 - ) – ‘Confessions Of A Frustrated Housewife’ (1976, La moglie di mio padre)
58. Giuliano Biagetti (12 April 1925 – 29 March 1998) – ‘The Novice’ (1975, La novizia)
59. Nanni Loy (23 October 1925 – 21 August 1995) – ‘Fiasco In Milan’ (1959, Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti)
60. Valerio Zurlini (19 March 1926 – 26 October 1982) – ‘Black Jesus’ (1968, Seduto alla sua destra)
61. Paolo Cavara (4 July 1926 – 7 August 1982) – ‘Black Belly Of The Tarantula’ (1971, La tarantola dal ventre nero)
62. Silvio Amadio (8 August 1926 – 19 August 1995) – ‘So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious’ (1975, Peccati di gioventù)
63. Franco Prosperi (2 September 1926 – 17 October 2004) – ‘Gunan, King Of The Barbarians’ (1982, Gunan il guerriero)
64. Duccio Tessari (11 October 1926 – 6 September 1994) – ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’ (1971, Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate)
65. Sergio Corbucci (6 December 1926 – 1 December 1990) – ‘The Great Silence’ (1968, Il grande silenzio)
66. Ferdinando Baldi (19 May 1927 – 12 November 2007) – ‘Get Mean’ (1975)
67. Lucio Fulci (17 June 1927 – 13 March 1996) – ‘One On Top Of The Other’ (1969, Una sull'altra)
68. Pasquale Festa Campanile (28 July 1927 – 25 February 1986) – ‘Hitch-Hike’ (1977, Autostop rosso sangue)
69. Marco Ferreri (11 May 1928 – 9 May 1997) – ‘The Flesh’ (1991, La carne)
70. Lina Wertmüller (14 August 1928 - ) – ‘Swept Away’ (1974, Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto)
71. Maurizio Liverani (27 November 1928 - ) ‘The Furrow Of A Peach’ (1976, Il solco di pesca)
72. Sergio Leone (3 January 1929 – 30 April 1989) – ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’ (1968, C'era una volta il West)
73. Massimo Pupillo (7 January 1929 - ) – ‘Bloody Pit Of Horror’ (1965, Il boia scarlatto)
74. Elio Petri (29 January 1929 – 10 November 1982) – ‘The 10th Victim’ (1965, La decima vittima)
75. Stelvio Massi (26 March 1929 – 26 March 2004) – ‘Emergency Squad’ (1974, Squadra volante)
76. Mariano Laurenti (15 April 1929 - ) – ‘The Night Nurse’ (1979, L'infermiera di note)
77. Alberto De Martino (12 June 1929 – 2 June 2015) – ‘Holocaust 2000’ (1977)
78. Luigi Bazzoni (25 June 1929 - 1 March 2012) – ‘The Fifth Cord’ (1971, Giornata nera per l'ariete)
79. Piero Regnoli (29 July 1929 – 27 April 2001) – ‘The Playgirls And The Vampire’ (1960, L'ultima preda del vampire)
80. Vittorio Taviani (20 September 1929 - ) & Paolo Taviani (8 November 1931 - ) – ‘Chaos’ (1984, Kaos)
81. Luciano Ercoli (19 October 1929 – 15 March 2015) – ‘Killer Cop’ (1975, La polizia ha le mani legate)
82. Alfonso Brescia (6 January 1930 – 6 June 2001) – ‘War Of The Robots’ (1978, La guerra dei robot)
83. Rino Di Silvestro (30 January 1932 - 3 October 2009) – ‘Werewolf Woman’ (1976, La lupa mannara)
84. Antonio Margheriti (19 September 1930 – 4 November 2002) – ‘Naked And Die’ (1968, Nude... si muore)
85. Franco Rossetti (1 October 1930 - ) – ‘The Naked Horse’ (1972, : Una cavalla tutta nuda)
86. Francesco Maselli (9 December 1930 - ) - ‘Love In The City’ (1953, L'amore in città)
87. Luigi Russo (4 May 1931 - ) – ‘Blue Island’ (1982, Due gocce d'acqua salata)
88. Ettore Scola (10 May 1931 – 19 January 2016) (1982, Il mondo nuovo)
89. Mario Imperoli (24 June 1931 - 24 December 1977) – ‘Blue Jeans’ (1975)
90. Ermanno Olmi (24 July 1931 - ) – ‘The Job’ (1961, Il posto)
91. Bruno Mattei (30 July 1931 – 21 May 2007) – ‘Hell Of The Living Dead’ (1980, Virus)
92. Umberto Lenzi (6 August 1931 - ) – ‘Spasmo’ (1974)
93. Bruno Corbucci (23 October 1931 – 7 September 1996) – ‘The Cop In Blue Jeans’ (1976, Squadra antiscippo)
94. Romolo Guerrieri ( 5 December 1931 - ) – ‘Young, Violent , Dangerous’ (1976, Liberi armati pericolosi)
95. Fernando Di Leo (11 January 1932 – 1 December 2003) – ‘Caliber 9’ (1972, Milano calibro 9)
96. Gianfranco Mingozzi (5 April 1932 - 7 October 2009) – ‘Flavia The Heretic’ (1974, Flavia, la monaca musulmana)
97. Giuliano Carnimeo (4 July 1932 – 10 September 2016) – ‘The Case Of The Bloody Iris’ (1972, Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?)
98. Mario Caiano (13 February 1933 – 20 September 2015) – ‘Nightmare Castle’ (1965, Amanti d'oltretomba)
99. Tinto Brass (26 March 1933 - ) – ‘Frivolous Lola’ (1998, Monella)
100. Giulio Paradisi (21 March 1934 - ) – ‘The Visitor’ (1979, Stridulum)
101. Tonino Valerii (20 May 1934 – 13 October 2016) – ‘Day Of Anger’ (1967, I giorni dell'ira)
102. Enzo Milioni (18 July 1934 - ) – ‘The Sister Of Ursula’ (1978, La sorella di Ursula)
103. Piero Schivazappa (14 April 1935 - ) – ‘Lady Of The Night’ (1985, La signora della note)
104. Joe D'Amato (15 December 1936 – 23 January 1999) – ‘Provocation’ (1995, Provocazione)
105. Sergio Martino (19 July 1938 - ) – ‘Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key’ (1972, Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave)
106. Enzo Castellari (29 July 1938 - ) – ‘The Big Racket’ (1976, Il grande racket)
107. Pupi Avati (3 November 1938 - ) – ‘The House With Laughing Windows’ (1976, La casa dalle finestre che ridono)
108. Pasquale Squitieri (27 November 1938 – 18 February 2017) – ‘Corleone’ (1978)
109. Mario Bianchi (7 January 1939 - ) – ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ (1982, La bimba di Satana)
110. Corrado Farina (18 March 1939 – 11 July 2016) – ‘Baba Yaga’ (1973)
111. Ruggero Deodato (7 May 1939 - ) – ‘The Washing Machine’ (1993, Vortice mortale)
112. Bruno Gaburro (5 June 1939 - ) – ‘Malombra’ (1984)
113. Marco Bellocchio (9 November 1939 - ) – ‘Fists In The Pocket’ (1965, I pugni in tasca)
114. Bernardo Bertolucci (16 March 1940 - ) – ‘The Conformist’ (1970, Il conformista)
115. Dario Argento (7 September 1940 - ) – ‘Unsane’ (1982, Tenebre)
116. Nello Rossati (15 July 1942 – discovered dead in 2009) – ‘The Sensuous Nurse’ (1975, L'infermiera)
117. Michele Massimo Tarantini (7 August 1942 - ) – ‘The Teasers’ (1975, La liceale)
118. Francesco Barilli (4 February 1943 - ) – ‘The Perfume Of The Lady In Black’ (1974, Il profumo della signora in nero)
119. Lamberto Bava (3 April 1944 - ) – ‘A Blade In The Dark’ (1983, La casa con la scala nel buio)
120. Salvatore Samperi (26 July 1944 – 4 March 2009) – ‘Come Play With Me’ (1968, Grazie zia)

Martin Scorsese has consistently been listing 'The Leopard' among his top 5 / 10 films of all time for as long as I can remember. It was Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' (1973) that first got me first pondering the connections between America and American-Italians, back when I was just a kid (the films of his contemporaries Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma & Michael Cimino also meant a great deal to me growing up). The worldly Burt Lancaster found his spiritual home in Italy and Visconti was the director he credited with finally making him whole.


"Al Pacino’s father, Salvatore, was eighteen when Alfredo was born, in East Harlem, in 1940, and twenty when he left. He paid a few memorable visits, twice going to see his son perform in high-school plays, but Pacino saw very little of him, even after he had become a star. By then, Salvatore, who married five times and for decades worked as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, owned Pacino’s Lounge, a restaurant and bar in Covina, California, where he frequently joined the band to sing, play the maracas, and shake his booty. “When a friend met my dad, he looked at him and said, ‘There it is with you, Al. I see it. The survivor,’ ” Pacino said. “I got that from my dad.” (His mother) Rose, according to Pacino, was a reader who had “a sensitivity and a connection to the theatre.” She took Pacino to see Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway. She was playful, with a good sense of humor, but also volatile and reclusive. She often refused to leave her room when company came over. “She reminded me of a Tennessee Williams character. She would have been a really good Laura, also a good Amanda. She had both,” Pacino said, referring to Williams’s play “The Glass Menagerie.” In other words, she was a troubled, fragile, controlling, somewhat hysterical soul, who fought a losing battle against her own desperation. Despite the family’s meagre income, Rose scraped together enough to pay for visits to a psychiatrist. To treat her chronic depression, she resorted to electric-shock therapy. Eventually, she became addicted to barbiturates, which may have been the cause of her death, at forty-three, in 1962. The stain of her possible suicide hangs over Pacino’s memory of Rose. “Poverty took her down,” he said. Not long before she died, Pacino recalls rushing to a casting session for Elia Kazan’s “America America.” “I had one of the few fantasies I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I would do well, my mother would be O.K. with it all, and I could say, ‘Mom, we got it. We’re gonna make some money. It’s gonna be O.K.’ ” As it happened, Pacino arrived late and missed the audition. After Salvatore left, Rose and Sonny (as Pacino was known throughout his childhood) moved in with her parents, James Gerardi, a plasterer who was an illegal immigrant from Corleone, Sicily, and his wife, Kate. In their cramped three-room apartment in the South Bronx, which sometimes housed as many as seven people, Pacino never had a space of his own. (“I remember years of sleeping between my grandmother and grandfather,” he said.) At the same time, he was an only child, often left to his own devices. “I was always sort of building stories, creating stories,” he said. “It was a way of filling up the loneliness.” Storytelling ran in the family. In warm weather, Pacino’s grandfather, with whom Pacino had what he calls “one of the great relationships of my life,” would sit with him on the tar roof of their tenement and spin tales about his rough Dickensian youth in turn-of-the-century New York. “He got the shit kicked out of him by cops with helmets and big clubs—‘You little wop! Get over here, you stinking Guinea!’ ” Pacino said. “He’d talk about running away from home, living off the farms, how he would steal milk. He just loved talking to me, like we were on some little rowboat.” The roof, Pacino added, “was our terrace. There was this cacophony of sound—the Poles, the Jews, the Irish, the German, the Spanish. This definitive melting pot is what I came from. In some Eugene O’Neill plays, you hear the same thing.” Among many odd jobs, Rose worked as a cinema usherette, and when Pacino was three or four she began to take him to the movies. “The next day, I would act out all the parts,” he said. “I think that’s how it started.” Pacino was often coaxed into performing scenes for his extended family, which included a deaf aunt. His party piece was an imitation of Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend,” playing an alcoholic writer desperate for a drink. Pacino would open cupboards and doors, pretending to search for a hidden stash of booze. “I never understood why they were laughing, because I didn’t think it was funny,” he said. “But I knew it produced laughs.” On Bryant Avenue in the forties and fifties, people escaped their small, hot apartments to sit on stoops or hang out under street lamps to roll dice or play poker. To disarm bullies and find friends, Pacino used the same strategy on the street that he’d used at home: he performed and enlisted others to perform with him, earning the nickname “the Actor.” “We’d act out parts from joke books and comic books,” he told me. “Kids make videos today, but it was kind of an unusual thing then to get street urchins to join you in acting out comics. Of course, it never got off the ground; there’s a comedy in there somewhere.” “He was always full of drama,” said his neighbor Ken Lipper, who would later become the deputy mayor of New York and a producer and screenwriter of “City Hall” (1996), in which Pacino starred. “He loved to take on different personae. He used to go to 174th Street and pretend he was a blind child.” Pacino’s bravado and good looks got him noticed. “The girls in the neighborhood would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.’ The boys would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino,’ ” Pacino told me. “It started early.” Pacino was smoking at nine, chewing tobacco at ten, and drinking hard liquor at thirteen. He walked the edges of rooftops and jumped between tenement buildings. His favorite place was “the Dutchies,” a swampy labyrinth on the Bronx River, where truant kids hid in high marsh grasses. Pacino played third base for the Police Athletic League team, the Red Wings, which became a “quasi street gang,” with Al as its de-facto leader. In black wool jackets with a red stripe down the sleeve, the Red Wings patrolled their turf and protected it from roaming invaders, like the Young Sinners and the Fordham Baldies. Once, when they were twelve and sitting on the steps of a tenement after finishing a game of stickball, Lipper said, “some guy came over who was thirtyish and started menacing us. Al got up and whacked him with the stick.” Pacino’s wild crew, “tough kids with high I.Q.s and tragic endings,” became a template on which he modelled many of his memorable characters. “These people were a springboard for my profession,” he said. “They were part of what I consider the best time in my life.” Pacino was less popular with the authority figures around him."

- John Lahr, The New Yorker

“Sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by wolves. There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at home eating alone standing up. He did not relate to tables or the conversations people had at them.”

- Diane Keaton

Pacino :



Cazale (with Streep) :



De Niro :



Stallone & Travolta :



Buscemi :



Turturro :

Nice batch, gunshot. Lots of laughs and high on art. I like 'The Job' and 'The Tree Of Wooden Clogs' (1978) from Olmi. Are there any others you've seen that you'd recommend?

Have you seen any of Luciano Emmer's films? He's someone whose work I'm keen to explore in future.

Thanks for sharing such fascinating insights into Antonioni's demanding creative process, london, as well as your friend's experience in London. He definitely strived hard to put things up on screen the way he envisioned them in his mind.

Hi spiderwort. 'Cabiria' was the first Italian silent film I ever saw and the first I'd heard of at the time. A big historical epic with some impressive sets and visuals. I'd heard it was arguably the most influential of all Italian silents so it may well have influenced D W Griffith. His film 'Intolerance' is similarly spectacular.