Pietro Germi Biography
Pietro Germi was born in 1914 in Genoa. After attending middle school, he enrolled in the nautical institute in 1931, but abandoned his studies after taking part in a cruise in the Mediterranean. Germi was already interested in culture and literature, which he continued to cultivate as a self-taught. Passionate about cinema since his youth, he was part of an amateur drama club in S. Maria di Castello between 1933 and 1935. In the years preceding his move to Rome, Germi worked as a freight forwarder and spent about a year in Milan in almost total isolation. and he also began to write. Now determined to work in the world of cinema, he wrote a first story, published by the Cinema magazine of Milan, and then a second one which he sent to the pre-selection of the Fascist University Groups (GUF) of Genoa for applications for admission to the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome. Initially rejected, as the candidate lacked some of the required requirements - among other things the possession of a high school diploma -, Germi's application was then accepted, also thanks to a ploy, apparently suggested by A. Blasetti : he would have been accepted to the courses for actors, for which a diploma was not necessary, but in fact he could have attended the directing courses.
In the three years he spent at the Germi Center he did not particularly distinguish himself, but he nevertheless earned the reputation of a promising student.
During the Second World War Germi fell ill with pleurisy and was forced to hide from the fascist authorities, before returning to work as an assistant on two adventure films.
In 1946, Germi wrote his first real story, "The Witness", which was directed by himself with the Orbis production company. But success only came with "In the Name of the Law" in 1948. Germi's problem was to produce a "popular, national and non-conformist" cinema that would allow him to communicate to a wider audience what was urgent within him. The solution he found it in accordance with his usual way of making cinema, that is, trying different narrative modules, even if already experimented, and without ever moving away from a solidly structured form of story, and therefore from well-finished and well-defined screenplays. The last film is Alfredo Alfredo which was a happy return to the theme of the never-made subjects of his early youth. Germi died in Rome in 1974 due to a worsening of the liver cirrhosis from which he had been suffering for some time.
