AZ – Arturo Zavattini Photographer. Travel and cinema, 1950-1960.
Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 7.00 pm, in the Sala Levi of the Palazzo Lanfranchi Museum, the exhibition AZ – Arturo Zavattini Fotografo will be inaugurated. Travel and cinema, 1950-1960 edited by Francesco Faeta and Giacomo Daniele Fragapane, created by the Central Institute for Demoetnoanthropology and exhibited last year at the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions of Rome.
The exhibition, which arrives in Matera on the initiative of Regional Museum Complex of Basilicata and the University of Basilicata, provides for the exhibition of a large body of large format photographs, mostly unpublished, which illustrate the intense activity of street photographer of Arturo Zavattini between 1950 and 1960, a crucial decade in the history of the twentieth century.
The presentation will be attended by Marta Ragozzino, Director of the Regional Museum Complex of Basilicata; Aurelia Sole, Rector of the University of Basilicata; Ferdinando Mirizzi, Director DiCEM – UNIBAS; Francesco Faeta and Giacomo Daniele Fragapane, curators of the exhibition; Arturo Zavattini, author of the photographs.
After the exhibition of the recently inaugurated American Academy in Rome and the previous photographic exhibitions held at Palazzo Lanfranchi in recent years [we only remember the names of the photographers: Mario Cresci, Mario Carbone, Mariano Silletti, Nico Colucci, Luca Centola, Gundolf Pfotenhauer, Francesco Pentasuglia, Giuseppe Maino] as well as the symposium of the States General of Photography curated by Lorenza Bavetta, Matera is a full candidate to become City of Photography giving a further and significant contribution to the path of Matera – Basilicata 2019.
The exhibition is divided into 5 sections.
Journey to Lucania is the result of the work carried out in Tricarico in June 1952 during the first expedition to Lucania by Ernesto De Martino. The young Zavattini accompanied the great Italian ethnologist in conducting the pre-investigation with an extraordinary photographic account of daily life and rural traditions.
Travel in Italy is an ideal itinerary from the North to the South, with some slips offered by associations of logical sense or formal character and puts together images taken during the whole decade, at different times. Central to the observations appear in Rome and Naples, but there are many Italian cities and districts that are photographed with a careful, conscious, socially engaged eye; The result is an overall portrait of the country, of significant cultural and visual significance.
Travel to Thailand includes the images taken by Zavattini in Bangkok and in the province of Phetchaburi, at the northern end of the Malay peninsula, especially along the river of the same name and its canals, in 1956, in the spare time left by the shooting of the film La Diga on the Pacific by René Clément, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, published in 1957. The photographs document contrasting aspects of the life of the country with ample reference to the mixture of tradition and change and between Thai culture and Chinese cultures, and the rural dimension of the countryside and of the villages. These are rare images, of particular anthropological acuteness, which are among the first realized by an Italian in the Far Eastern country, during the immediate post-colonial transition that crossed the entire Indochinese area.
Travel to Cuba shows the images made in 1960 on the island, shortly after the Castro revolution, on the sidelines of the shooting of the film Historias de la revolución by Tomás Gutierréz Alea, to which the Italians, and in particular Martelli (director of photography of two of the three episodes of which the film was composed) and Zavattini (machine operator in the same episodes), participated in support of the nascent cinematography, devoid of means and experiences. They are made especially in La Habana and on the film set, placed in an impervious locality of the Sierra Maestra. On that occasion, Ernesto “Che” Guevara arrived on a friendly visit.
Backstage collects images taken at different times in some of the sets in which Zavattini participated, from that of Paul Strand to Luzzara, in Emilia, for the realization of the investigation that found editorial outcome in the book A country, to that of Federico Fellini for La dolce life, in Bassano di Sutri, in Lazio, to that of Historias de la revolución, on the Cuban Sierra. Many of these photographs depict characters such as Strand and Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, mostly caught in moments of pause during film shoots.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with critical texts by curators and other scholars, published by Contrasto.
The exhibition can be visited until February 14th 2017 during the opening hours of the Museum.
BIOGRAPHY
Arturo Zavattini, son of Cesare, was born in Luzzara in 1930. He discovered photography in 1949, when his father gave him his first camera: the first experiences in the darkroom date back to that time. In 1951, thanks to Vittorio De Sica who introduced him to Aldo Graziati, director of photography of Umberto D, he began his work in the cinema. Operator and director of photography of many Italian and foreign films he made his debut as a photographer accompanying Ernesto de Martino in his first ethnographic expedition in Lucania, in June 1952. In 1982 he signed the photo of La veritàaaa, the only film written, interpreted and directed by his father . He will then dedicate himself entirely to the Cesare Zavattini Archives, which he still leads.