Luigi Comencini Biography
Luigi Comencini was born in Salò in 1916. After spending his adolescence in the French province, he graduated in architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, where he was part of the artistic-literary magazine "Corrente". In the mid-1930s, together with Alberto Lattuada and Mario Ferrari, he dedicated himself to finding and preserving old films, laying the foundations for the foundation of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan. In the 1940s he collaborated as a film critic, first with "Avanti!", then with the weekly "Tempo". His cinematographic debut took place in 1937 with the short film La novelletta, which takes up the documentary tradition which constitutes one of the leitmotifs of all his activity and which will develop immediately after the war with his first important work, the documentary short Children in the city (1946 ), on the condition of children in urban suburbs. The work aroused the interest of Lux Film, which entrusted him with the creation of a film in the wake of the success achieved in those years by Norman Taurog's Boys Town (1938). Comencini thus directed his first feature film, Proibito rubare (1948), set among the Neapolitan urchins, for which he was also the screenwriter with Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Armando Curcio; however, the film did not make the expected box office receipts. The production of the 1960s and 1970s unfolds along various thematic and creative lines: from the parodic comedies The Companion Don Camillo (1965) and The Italian Secret Services (1968) to the dramatic Senza Sapere niente di Lei (1969), with its bitter irony The Scientific Scoop (1972) and Love's Crime (1974) to the thriller La donna della Domenica (1975), to the apocalyptic moralizer L'ingorgo, una storia impossibile (1979). The heterogeneity of this production justifies the opinion of those who consider Comencini the author of an 'average cinema', a triumph of genres and characters, attentive to the description of environments and psychological profiles and often discontinuous in expressive outcomes. In the following years, interest in childhood returned to the center of Comencini's filmography, further characterized by long literary television productions: Cuore (1985) by E. De Amicis and La Storia (1987) by E. Morante. In 1992 there was a remake of Marcellino pane e vino. An author who is difficult to categorize, as evidenced by the various labels ('childhood director', father of 'pink neorealism' or 'Italian comedy') attributed to him by critics, Comencini was able to grasp the changes in post-war Italy, in its social as well as subjective dimension, through a very varied filmography in terms of thematic choices and narrative registers. Awarded the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1954 for Pane, amore e fantasia (1953), in 1967 he obtained the David di Donatello for best director for Incompreso (1966) and in 1987 the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Mostra of Venice cinema.
