Gillo Pontecorvo Biography
Gillo Pontecorvo was born in Pisa in 1919 and received an anti-fascist and secular education. He was expelled from high school and showed little interest in the high school curriculum. In 1936 he reluctantly enrolled in the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Pisa. In 1939 he joined his brother Bruno in Paris to attend a journalism course. While in the French capital, he worked for Havas and came into contact with the clandestine Italian Communist Party, which had taken refuge in France after the fascist dictatorship had abolished political parties. Pontecorvo participated in the Piedmontese resistance under the code name Barnaba. After the Second World War he worked as a correspondent for the newspapers "Repubblica" and "Paese sera" in Paris and became director of "Pattuglia", a weekly magazine for the socialist and communist youth of Europe. Going back and forth between Italy and Paris, Pontecorvo directed a series of documentaries such as "Missione Timiriazev" (1953), set in the Po Delta, "Dogs Behind Bars," which showed an early hint of storytelling, and " Porta Portese", both released in 1954, and "Bread and Sulphur" (1956), a film close to neorealism in terms of language and subject. He made his directorial debut with "Giovanna" (1956), an episode of the collective film "Die Windrose", directed by Joris Ivens on the role of women in social struggles. After ten years and several unrealized projects, including "Confino Fiat", written together with Solinas, Pontecorvo directed "Operación Ogro" in 1973, a film about the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister L. Carrero Blanco, protégé of General F. Franco, December 20, 1973, based on a book by one of the conspirators. The film's political implications and the legitimacy of the armed struggle sparked much controversy, although its technical quality was widely recognized. In 1992 he was appointed director of the Venice Film Festival and worked to bridge the gap between "high" and experimental cinema during his five-year tenure. He was president of the Ente Nazionale del Cinema (now Cinecittà Holding) and, after almost twenty years of inactivity, he directed the short film "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy - Voglia di Sicurezza", an episode of the collective film "I corti italiani" ( 1997), which exudes a nostalgic feeling for the magical holidays of childhood. Together with other important Italian directors, he signed the Udine part of the documentary "12 directors for 12 cities" (1989) and "Another World is Possible" (2001), another documentary on the events that occurred in Genoa during the G8 of July 2001. Pontecorvo's works have an essential style, supported by a non-narrative editing based on dry news and a musical commentary that intensifies the pace of the film. He remained faithful to the idea of a cinema marked by a strong ideological commitment and a powerful accusation, whose common denominator is the 'dictatorship of truth', an investigation into 'limit' situations in which a rupture and an overturn inevitably occur , while individual figures struggle against the background of collective situations.
