Following my brief piece on La primula bianca in the Italian Crime Films category, I’ve been doing a bit of searching about director Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, one of the great elder statesmen of Italian Cinema.
Anyway, here’s a brief clip of him being interviewed on YouTube
In addition, there’s also a lengthy obit in the Corrieri Della Sera:
Addio to Bragaglia, who was 103 years old. He’d directed Toto and Nazzari, and died in Rome aged 103. He was in the S. Giacomo Hospital, where he’d had an operation on his femur following a fall. I’d had some great chats with Bragaglia, who spoke of his 103 years in a book. He never suffered any memory loss, any kind of senility, and was full of life and remembered everything about his time making films with outspokenness and good humour. He was passionate about the women: ‘I gave up on falling in love when I was 91, when I became too delicate’. He’d give his judgement on the actors. Nazzari? ‘A gentleman’. Rascel? ‘A pain in the neck’. Toto (who he directed in several films, including Toto le moko)? ‘An ignoramus’. Seeing the onlookers wince, he’d pause knowingly… ‘in the sense that ignorance was a true quality.’
Of his colleagues, his opinions were equally resolute. Gennaro Righelli? ‘My maestro, the most worthy of all’. Camerini? ‘Very deserving of merit’. De Sica? ‘Good, serious, disciplined, but his brain was Zavattini’. Fellini, Antonioni? ‘Two directors of modern cinema, who I consider in an equal light with Castellani and Germi. I envy all of them… each of their films I want to emulate’.
Bragaglia moved from being a still photogrpaher to becoming a director in 1932 with La borsa o la vita, and began his career at the side of his beloved brother, Anton Giulio, who had bought to life the Casa D’Arte Bragaglia in via Condutti, before moving to the Teatro degli Indipendenti in via degli Avignonesi (‘everyone came to see the plays and have dinner’). But his true calling became clear when he came into contact with the movie camera. ‘The director is a carpenter, who makes the seats, the scaffolds, the tables. I did comedies, historical films, mythological, dramas, farces’. The first of his numerous titles, La fossa degli angeli (36) was shot amongst the quarries of Massa Carrara, and he feels saddened that the film is lost: ‘I’d hoped to see it recovered in some basement somewhere and that they’d perhaps write: here’s a masterpiece that anticipated the neo-realist movement’.
