Gianni Franciolini Biography
Gianni Franciolini was born in Florence in 1910. He was interested in the French cinema of the 1930s and the atmosphere of American detective films, which influenced the films he directed. Franciolini was a genre director who used some of the best Italian screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Although his work has been almost forgotten over the years, it stands out for its fine sensitivity in the construction of female portraits and its particular visual style which is evident in the alternation of lights and shadows, of almost expressionist origin.
After moving to Paris in the late 1920s where he became a follower of Eugène Deslaw's avant-garde movement, he developed as assistant director to Georges Lacombe. Subsequently, he returned to Italy in 1940 and directed his first film, Inspector Vargas. His ability as a director was particularly revealed with Lighthouses in the Fog, where he showed his dry and essential style, which was based on the fatalism of French poetic realism and anticipated certain elements of Neorealism. Franciolini was also the author of an episode of the collective film We are women and of the episodic film Villa Borghese. However, he took a decisive turn in his career, directing "light" genre films such as Le Signorine dello 04 (1955), Roman Tales, Sin of Chastity (1956) and Summer Tales (1958).
Franciolini directed the period film Ferdinando I re di Napoli (1959), starring the three De Filippo brothers, before dying prematurely in Turin in 1960. His exhibition showed that his work was characterized by his attention to detail and construction of the atmospheres on which his stories moved.
