Alberto Cavallone Biography
Alberto Cavallone (1938 - 1997) was an Italian director and screenwriter. Cavallone's films are unconventional and often contain a mixture of explicit violence, surrealism and eroticism. Unfortunately, many of his films have been lost or remained invisible because they were never distributed. When Cavallone was 17, he went to Algeria, then in the throes of a war of independence, with a Paillard 16mm camera. The footage collected there formed the structure of his first cinematic effort, The Dirty War, intended as a non-aligned political documentary. The film, released in 1959, is now lost. His debut feature film, Out of Sight, was never completed and remains unseen. After a five-year apprenticeship as assistant director of around twenty Italian films, Cavallone returned to directing in 1969 with the feature film Le salamandre, which was well received. Thus Cavallone's profile grows enormously. Hence his successes: From our correspondent in Copenhagen; in 1971, Quickly, Guns and Kisses for Breakfast, a low-budget affair that used discarded sets from larger films and incorporated footage from the unfinished musical; in 1973 he directed Afrika, set in Ethiopia; in 1974 Cavallone produced Zelda, an erotic thriller. The following year he directed Maldoror in Turkey and Italy, inspired by the poem Les Chants de Maldoror by the Count de Lautréamont. In 1977 Cavallone published the surreal Spell, known in the English-speaking world as Man, Woman and Beast and considered his masterpiece film, certainly his most exposed work. In the 1980s he directed surrealist erotic thrillers and his work transformed into a production of “porn with plots”. In 1983, he contributed to the story of Umberto Lenzi's fantasy film Ironmaster (aka The Iron War). The early 1990s saw him direct commercials and help revise other writers' scripts and storyboards for at least one animated film. At the time of his death, Cavallone was attempting to direct a comeback film, Internet Story.
