Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini, masters of cuttings

Giannalberto Bendazzi

At the end of the 1950s, Giulio Gianini was a promising director of photography and documentary filmmaker, who had been infected by the animation virus. Emanuele Luzzati was the Italian Chagall. Together they became an artistic couple. For more than thirty years they were a pillar of the minute but respected Italian animation movie industry in a global context.

Everyone was experimenting: Alexeieff used pinscreen, Norman McLaren painted on film, Trnka told lavish stories with puppets, Eastern European artists invented 'Aesopian' films to mock power. While in the gilded world of “Cinéma Vérité” (cinema of truth), Hitchcock was putting an end to his glorious career (The Birds, 1963), Kubrick was becoming increasingly aesthetic, Tarkovsky was getting more hermetic after Mirror, Federico Fellini, after his ingeniously inspired Amarcord, wrote (1974) to Gianini and Luzzati: "Dear friends, I saw your Pulcinella. Well, you remember how much I liked La gazza ladra; I thought you could not have done any better. I’m glad to say, however, that you did. Pulcinella is more beautiful... It describes a feeling of the human being – suffering -, and an irrepressible need for justice... Above all, your Pulcinella tells the grotesque and excruciating drama of a man striving to be free”.

Gianini and Luzzati were masters in the art of assembling and moving pieces of cardboard, crumpled tinfoil, or fragments of any material: it was called cut-out animation. The limitation of cut-out animation is its rigidity. Instead, Luzzati's sparkling colours move, stretch, and shrink like classical dancers under Gianini's delicate lens. Another limitation is that characters lack facial expression. And yet, Lindoro, in Italiana in Algeri moves in a way that today could be matched only by another great cutout animator: the Russian Jurij Norštej. But Luzzati's fundamental invention is the mask. A great mask of the world. With this creation, he reaches the essence of things in just a few strokes. Plus, he combines it with colour.

Luzzati and Gianini, therefore, are master orchestrators. The great mask of the show is equally applied to Rossini and Mozart, to the fairy tales written by Rodari, Carlo Gozzi and Luzzati himself. Let’s take The Magic Flute as an example: Luzzati first challenged himself with opera in 1963, at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, in England, creating sets and costumes for a production by Franco Enriquez. Suddenly, music came to him as a revelation: “Before, I would see operas as prose performances. With The Magic Flute, I understood that the different characters have even musical needs. I realised that a scene can change in time with music, and that music dictates the rhythm of movements, images, and colours.” The movie choreographies of La gazza ladra, L’Italiana in Algeri, and Il Turco in Italia directly derive from The Magic Flute (1978), which also informed the first, magnificent Pulcinella.

And what about reviews? To show how discerning film critics can (sometimes) be, and how much they could stand for our two filmmakers in the most refined capitals, I would like to report the following: the movie Viva Maria! was directed by Louis Malle, starring Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. These celebrities used to draw crowds to movie theaters back in 1965. In Great Britain, La Gazza Ladra was distributed together with this movie, to completement the programme. Dylis Powell, journalist and reviewer at Sunday Times, wrote a rave review of the film by our two animators, while dedicating only a few distracted and scornful lines to the all-star cast movie.

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