Lorenza Mazzetti

Lorenza Mazzetti is an Italian film director, novelist and painter.

However, since she is writing out of an inner need and not for a professional reason, she resists the definition of a writer. She wants to connect with young people and remind them of the tragedy that she was a testimony of as a child: the Nazi murder of her adopted family, the family of Robert Einstein.

Childhood and family tragedy

Mazzetti’s mother, Olga Liberati, died shortly after giving birth to the twins Lorenza und Paola. Her father, Corrado Mazzetti, gave custody of his children to a wet nurse in the village Anticoli Corrado, where they spent the first three years of their life. When Corrado Mazzetti realised that the nurse was taking advantage of his absence and leaving the children alone while he was out at work, his friend Ugo Giannattasio, a futurist painter, offered to take care of them in his family.

Some time later the twins moved to live with their paternal aunt. Corrado’s sister Cesarina (Nina) Mazzetti took the twins into her home, a farm in Rignano sull’Arno, where she lived with her husband Robert Einstein (a cousin of Albert Einstein) and their two daughters Annamaria und Luce. Here Lorenza and Paola become part of the family and lived happy and untroubled.

During the Second World War, the farm home was occupied by a department of the Wehrmacht. With the advancement of the allies, after the last motor truck had just vanished and the English army was attacking behind the hills with cannons and rifles, three German officers (who related themselves to the Erfassung Göring) stepped into the villa and asked for Robert Einstein. Nina, quick witted, answered that he was not at home. The officers announced that they would return shortly. Assuming that the only person in danger would be her husband, Nina begged him to hide in the woods. However, when the officers returned on August 3, 1944 and did not find Robert Einstein, they assassinated his family. This incident is known as the Strage di Rignano.

Lorenza and Paola Mazzetti escaped the massacre because of their different surname. The officers had specifically homed in on the name ‘Einstein’. But their lives had become tainted forever by the atrocious execution of their aunt and their cousins. After the carnage they were carried away along with the farmers who had been in the cellars to protect themselves from the bombing of the English army. The farm villa was set on fire. Robert Einstein, who had hidden in the woods, was overwhelmed by pain and committed suicide on 13 July 1945. Lorenza and Paola were entrusted to a custodian that their uncle had authorised with the administration of his estate that he had passed on to them. 

Life in London in the Fifties. The films K and Together

After her diploma, and determined to bury the terrible memory in her unconscious, Lorenza left Italy for London. There she received a message from her sister Paola that their custodian had squandered their whole wealth and had left the sisters penniless. In order to be able to stay in London, Lorenza took a job as a chambermaid in an eatery at Charing Cross.

She could not pay her rent, but with wit and tenacity—and thanks to the sympathy of the Director William Coldstream, who was impressed by her, she was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art.

Between 1952 and 1953, after she had stolen film footage and the spools from the school, Lorenza secretly released her first film, “K”. The topic of the film deals with the story of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and is interpreted by the painter Michael Andrews. Unbeknownst to its author, the film preceded the future Free Cinema, which in 1956 would be written down and signed by Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lorenza Mazzetti.

“K” is a strongly biographically stamped story dealing with the theme of alienation. The sound track was produced by Daniele Paris, who also worked with Mazzetti and Lindsay Anderson in their later projects. To develop the film reels and to obtain a copy of her film, Lorenza was prepared to make a false statement and risk prison time. Fortunately she was saved by William Coldstream, who was convinced by her talent and organised a showing of the film in the Aula Magna of the Slade School. He invited Denis Forman, the director of the British Film Institute. At the end of the performance Forman asked Lorenza Mazzetti: “Would you like to make a film without running the risk of going to prison?”. He invited her to partake in a new film project, which was to be financed by the Experimental Film Fund. As a result, the film Together came to life.

Besides Michael Andrews, protagonist of the film “K”, “Together” is interpreted by the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. This film tells the stories of two deaf-mutes in the East End of London and was produced by the same film crew than the previous film. “Together”was written also by Denis Horne, but Horne left the production because of a disagreement with the director, who did not want to incorporate his long dialogs in the recording. The montage works, guided by the same Mazzetti, were finished thanks to an intervention by Lindsay Anderson. He called on Daniele Paris from Rome to write and direct the sound track. 

In this way “Together” gained its first cycle of projections of the Free Cinema and wins the "Mension au film del recherch" on the Festival di Cannes 1956, conjoined with the Brassaï film Tant qu'il y aura des bêtes.

In her book “Diario Londinese”, published by Sellerio in 2014, Lorenza Mazzetti describes the audacious adventures of this time.

Return to Italy and success of Il cielo cade (The Sky Falls)

After leaving London in order to collect her film price in Cannes, Lorenza decided to return to Italy for a while. She wished to see her twin sister, who in the meantime had given birth to a daughter. However back in Italy she became haunted by the tragic murder of her adopted family and fell into a deep depression, leading her to stay longer than originally planned. After a long phase of treatment, and thanks to the psychotherapist Barrie Simmons, she managed to excavate the suppressed and to reclaim parts of the tender, magical memories of her childhood—even if accompanied by a lot of pain. This is how she began to work on her book Il cielo cade.

The manuscript was rejected by several editors until Lorenza sent it to Cesare Zavattini. He reacted with enthusiasm and presented it to Attilio Bertolucci, publisher of Garzanti. Bertolucci declared the book a little masterpiece: he published and sent the work to the Premio Viareggio, where in 1962 “Il cielo cade” won first prize.

“Il cielo cade” is written in a narrative style of a child and from a child’s perspective, completely foreign to that of an adult: the world in war described from the view point of a child, that is in love with Gesu’, the Duce and with its adoptive uncle. It is a tragic but also a comical book. Worried that the tone of her story could offend the memory of the Einstein family, Lorenza changed the names of the protagonists. Federico Fellini compared the novel with Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, while Henri Michaux calls it “un petit livre féroce”.

When Garzanti’s rights to the text expired, “Il cielo cade” was republished by Elvira Sellerio. Lorenza confessed to the publisher that rather than a novel, the book was more her own biography. As a result of this, Elvira Sellerio asked her to dedicate the book to the Einstein family and add a photo of Nina and Robert Einstein. The novel, now published by Sellerio, is considered a classic of temporary Italian literature. In the year 2000, “Il cielo cade” was filmed under the same title by brothers Andrea Frazzi and Antonio Frazzi. It was staged by Suso Cecchi D’Amico and acted out by Isabella Rossellini. In the same year the film won the price for the best film on the Giffoni Film Festival.

The following novel Con rabbia (Rage) is published in 1963 by Garzanti: “Penny hates not only the Germans, who have murdered her family but all hypocritical philistines, who make themselves guilty each day again”. 

Life in Rome. Puppet Theatre and other publications. 

In the Sixties Lorenza met Bruno Grieco, a journalist, writer and son of Ruggero Grieco, who—together with Bordiga, Gramsci and Terracini—founded the Partito Comunista Italiano. Grieco was prompted by Cesare Zavattini to accompany Lorenza to the international exhibition of the “Cinema libero di Porretta Terme”. Together with Giampaolo Testa and Leonida Repaci, the creatives were determined to win the price for the best film there. Lorenza and Grieco began what was to be a long relationship. Their shared apartment on Via Vittoria, Rome, was frequented by many artists and intellectuals. Besides the protagonists of the Free Cinema (Lindsay Anderson, Reisz, Richardson, Richard Harris and Tom Courtenay), there was also Daisy Lumini, Marguerite Duras, Max Frisch, Malcolm McDowell, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, Guillaume Chpaltine, Serge Reggiani, Agnès Varda, Anouk Aimée, Achille Perilli, Piero Dorazio, Renzo Vespignani, Francesco Trombadori and, amongst others, Gian Maria Volonté, who played endless ping-pong matches with Giovanni Berlinguer.

When Cesare Zavattini commissioned a team of young directors to produce the episode film Le italiane e l’amore (1961), he entrusted Lorenza Mazzetti an episode that dealt with children. She accepted, but after the shooting decided to leave the film world because the “cinema verita’” did not interest her. 

Thanks to her prices and the public recognition that Lorenza Mazzetti had gained in the meantime, she was offered a collaboration with the magazin Vie Nuove (where Pier Paolo Pasolini was also writing at the time) by the Partito Comunista. In this magazine, Lorenza wrote a weekly column, in which she invited the reader to tell her their dreams. She then interpreted these dreams together with jungian psychoanalyst Vincenzo Loriga. Through this, the concept of the unconscious was introduced to the world of the workers for the first time. Unfortunately, this venture was judged as too risky by the communist party—meaning that Lorenza had to renounce any hope of working with Italian broadcasting station Rai, even though a minor collaboration had already started there.

The articles of Lorenza Mazzetti in Vie Nuove are collected in the volume “Il lato oscuro. L’inconscio degli italiani”, published by Tindalo in 1969.

In the same year her novel “Uccidi il padre e la madre” (Kill Your Mother and Father) was released. It is an existentialist novel, telling the story of a young revolutionary women who does not succeed in getting out of a station that she entered in order to depart from there. 

Later, in the surroundings of the Campo de’ Fiori, Lorenza starts the “Puppet Theatre”, a marionette theatre for children. This brings famous English marionettes Pulcinella and his wife Punch e Judy to Rome. In 1974 Lorenza met Luigi Galletti, a partisan of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica of Giovanni Pesce. He was dressed up as the marshall Harold Alexander. The pair later married. He was a fascinating and humorous man, and an estimated doctor. Lorenza pulled him in the puppet theatre, where he performed the voices of the king, the giant and the wolf. 

At the same time Mazzetti dedicated herself to interpreting children’s dreams and to putting them on stage in schools. The experiment was financed by Franco Enriquez, the director of the “Teatro di Roma”. The results of the laboratories were published by Guaraldi in the volume of the year 1975 “Il teatro dell’io: l’onirodramma. I bambini drammatizzano a scuola i loro sogni”.

Lorenza Mazzetti today: paintings, restoration of K and its distribution

Recently, Lorenza Mazzetti has developed a notable work as a painter, which culminates in two exhibitions: The Album di famiglia with 80 paintings illustrating the events described in the novel “Il Cielo cade” and A proposito del Free Cinema, where she created portraits of key figures of the English cinema during the Fifties and Sixties. The exhibition was shown in several cities: in Rome in the Complesso San Michele, the seat of the “Beni Culturali”, where it was visited over three months by schoolchildren; in Florence in the Palazzo Medici; in Porretta Terme (BO), and in Mantova and in Dresden, where it had been co-organised by the Italian Consulat together with the Jewish Community and the University Dresden. 

“K”, which had been jealously guarded by its author, was reconstructed only in 2010 by the Assoziation Cinit Cineforum Italiano. Thanks to Marco Duse und Marco Vanelli the film was transferred to DVD and got attached to the number 168 of the magazine Cabiria. Studi di cinema. It has been shown in London, Venice, Florence, Bologna and Rome and is to be shown in many other cities along with “Together”.

In a certain way all the books of Lorenza Mazzetti can be seen as a continuation of “Il cielo cade”. Furthermore, the “Diario londinese” is a kind of ‘prequel’ in which Mazzetti describes the upcoming of the Free Cinema and also the Angry Young Men. The stream of consciousness is a suppression of the past that cause of all Mazzetti’s undertakings, and probably also the cause of all her successes. The “Diario Londinese” was presented for the first time in Rome by the “Casa del Cinema di Roma”, by Irene Bignardi and Antonio Gnoli.

Today it is Lorenza’s main objective to show the film Il cielo cade in schools. She wants to talk with young people in order to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, by the example of the tragedy of the Einstein family. A massacre that would have been kept a secret if not for her book.

Filmography

Other works

References

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