Goffredo indulged in celluloid

"More than a bizarre film, it is a beautiful film", so begins Goffredo Fofi's review of Alexander Mackendrick's Cyclone on Jamaica, an author that the Eugubinian loved and appreciated even when public and critics, as in this case, had not rewarded him. And it is a rather touching synchronicity to find in the incipit of the first card chosen for consultation, the adjective contained in the title of the precious and ponderous volume just published by La nave di Teseo, Cinema e bizzarria. The book has the beauty of being able to be plucked for taste, curiosity, whim or study (it is also an excellent handbook for a reviewer). In the case of the writer, the decision to glide directly over the Scottish director stems from Fofi's fondness for Mackendrick in the last articles of a thirty-year collaboration in these columns.

The 620 pages of Cinema e bizzarria, signed by the unrepeatable literary-cinematographic-philosophical-pedagogical-sociological-political critic, contain one hundred and twenty-five files, born from a cycle of conversations - "stirred up" by Anna Antonelli and Marcello Anselmo in the Zazà programme on Radio 3 -, free and flying on cinema and literature, drawing on a solid magma of Fofi's notions, references, knowledge, speculations. In turn, the title of the conversations was a tribute to Bellezza e bizzarria by Mario Praz, whose works Fofi had edited for Garzanti in a new edition. Exceptional and commendable is the work of the editor, Sergio Arecco, who appealed not only to Goffredo's oratorical talents, uncoordinated by Giorgio Laurenti, but also to his manifold written production to give a complete, lucid and brilliant form to the film analyses. It was not easy, since the genius (first thrashing!) of the Eugubinian was ramified, complex and generous and always ended in a perfect 'accomplished' after a superlative rollercoaster ride, even syntactic.

Useful are the chronological division that follows the years of film release (from the Twenties to the Thousand) and the painstaking and very laborious index of titles and names. Thus one can easily go by "dips" of paper or digital browsing, depending on one's cinephile inclinations or the traces left by Fofi. To return to the 1965 film by the Scottish director, "it is the last of the great pirate films," Fofi writes, ignoring the Caribbean-Hollywood saga (great by numbers) of Captain Jack Sparrow-Johnny Depp. And a swim in beauty begins. Fofi starts from Richard Hughes' literary masterpiece of the same name, from which the film is taken, and drills down on the writer's profile, referring to Capote, Golding, Brook, Isherwood. Then, he gets to the plot with geographical-historical scenarios and the profile of the protagonist Anthony Quinn, citing some of his acting tests: Fellini's The Road, Zorba the Greek by Cacoyannis and the book by Kazantzakis that had been its support.

Because for Goffredo, cinema and literature (but also theatre and music) were inseparable, the first 'tools' of a reflection to interpret reality. As a child in Gubbio, the cinema had been a window of connections and conjectures that opened wide, never to close again, in Paris, where he became the inveterate cinephile we know, critic for "Positif". The conjurer's narrative, pulling a thousand rabbits (and all of them beautiful) out of his hat, was the result of his irrepressible enthusiasm to transmit and network with his readers. But only the network he considered valid: the others were to be discarded, like Disney, of which he saved nothing, not even Snow White. He did not find himself in that gluey childhood with bourgeois redemption. It was, rather, Cyclone on Jamaica 'absolutely one of the most beautiful films about childhood that I know, directed by one of my favourite directors', whose masterpieces he remembers: Mandy, the Little Deaf Mute, Sammy Goes South, The Lady Murders 'a jewel of English humour' and Hot Lead 'a masterpiece... a very violent, very harsh story'.

There are about twenty Italian films (Blasetti, Bolognini, Brusati, Caprioli, Cavalcanti, Citti, De Filippo, De Santis, Fellini, Freda, Leone, Leonviola, Matarazzo, Mattoli, Missiroli, Monicelli, Pagliero, Risi, Steno, Visconti), but each one is recounted as a small essay on our national cinematography. I knew her well by Antonio Pietrangeli talks about the economic boom and the emigrants from the South, in which Fofi had taken an interest when he came to Turin following Raniero Panzieri, one of the three Maestri to whom he dedicated a portrait in Pasqua di maggio (the others were Aldo Capitini and Elsa Morante).From this film, an overview of 'Commedia all'italiana' begins, whose high points for Fofi are I soliti ignoti by Monicelli (with references to The Asphalt Jungle by another favourite filmmaker, John Houston) and La dolce vita. A provocation and an assertion the latter, given that most critics did not consider Fellini's film part of the 'Comedy'. Fofi recalls the 'extraordinary' narrators of this fortunate strand: in addition to Monicelli, Risi, Comencini, Salce, and then emphasised the screenwriters of Io la conoscevo bene, Maccari and Scola, whose La terrazza and Una giornata particolare he loved. But what also interested him was Pietrangeli's look at women, the vision of their 'massacre' (he uses this word). The film was made in 1965 and the chronicle tells us that it is still, unfortunately, relevant today.