“I have an ambition that I have never revealed to anyone, not even myself. To be forgotten as a director and instead rediscovered as a photographer”. He confessed it to Paese sera in 1981 (“the most terribly sincere thing I’ve ever said”), just as he was about to show his Polaroids at the Porretta Terme Festival and before directing “A Photographer’s Adventures” for television (from the story by Italo Calvino). And yet Francesco Maselli, who died in Rome at the age of 92 (there he was born on December 9, 1930), on closer inspection was always a “photographer”, because his films and his equally important political work have always made an effort to Fixing, even “stopping” reality that pulsated around him because he was interested in highlighting all the elements that made it up, rather than narrating their evolution and dialectics. In the end, he smothers the pulsations and impulses of his works in order to isolate their themes, messages and values.
Baptized by his uncle Luigi Pirandello, son of an art critic who opened the house to the intellectual and progressive Roman world (Bontempelli, Savinio, Alvaro, Cecchi), Citto – da Francesco – Maselli shows a surprising precocity in everything: at seven years old he knew Hamlet by rote; At thirteen he brought arms and food to the partisans of the Gap during the German occupation, became involved in the Unione Studenti Italiani and thus managed to join the PCI at the age of just fourteen. After making two short films with surreal tones, at the age of seventeen he was admitted to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia: in 1949 the documentary “Bagnaia Paese Italiano” was awarded in Venice, the following year he worked with Antonioni on the script of “Cronaca di un amore” and “The Lady Without Camellias” in 1952. He made his directorial debut in 1953 with “Storia di Caterina”, a sequel to “L’amore in città”, and in 1955, at the age of 25, he directed his first Feature film, “Gli sbandati”, which received a special mention at the Venice Film Festival. Constructing the film around the theme of individual responsibility in the face of resistance, Maselli here begins to address the issue of class consciousness and the moral crisis of the bourgeoisie , which is also the focus of the subsequent «I delfini» (1960 ), where the unrealistic ambitions of a group of young people finally give way to flattery and compromise ensue of their fathers, and «Gli indifferenti» (1964), where Moravia’s novel serves to underscore the perennial vices of a seemingly inept class at grappling with history (the film is set in the 1920s, after the first two were set in the 1940s and 1950s respectively).
In between lay the failure of «La donna del giorno» (1958, the story of a model who accepts any compromise in order to advance a career), but the debt owed by the director and screenwriter to a Marxist interpretation of reality that ends the characters to “lock up” in his films and, above all, to make them cases and examples suitable to illustrate his ideas. However, his militancy seems to have waned in the mid-1960s, giving way to a series of lucrative endorsement deals for Perugina, Buitoni and Peroni (his «Caroselli» with Terence Hill and Solvi Stubing: «Call me Peroni, I’ll be your Bier!») and zur “Flattery” of comedy. But even if it is sharply attacked by left-wing critics: “Hurry up and kill me… I’m cold!” (1967) and “Rob your Neighbor…” (1968) pursue an unchanged ideological credo – stigmatization of the felt-killing power of money or conformism , who destroys the urge for freedom – even if they use the forms of paradox and allegory (and, firstly, has the obvious ambition to quote Lubitsch and his “tip on competence”).
The poor box office results of the two films and a more general reconsideration of his role and commitment (no stranger to the decision to go into analysis) bring Maselli back to political militancy close to the Ingraian left: he joins the Secretariat of one of the PCI Cinema Commission, he is secretary of the ANAC (Association of Film Authors) and is committed to the renewal of the Venice Biennale, becomes a councilor even if his plan of “permanent cultural ennoblement” is never realized. The first impact of this return to engagement is «Open Letter to an Evening Paper» (1970), where he stigmatizes the intellectual’s impotence in the face of the real challenges of the revolution (in this case, the struggle in Vietnam) that will follow in 1975, «The Suspicion of Francesco Maselli” – to avoid confusion with Hitchcock’s “The Suspicion” – where the anti-fascist struggle of a militant exile in France in 1934 becomes a reflection on the Stalinist temptations of the CPI also a praise of his self-sacrificing commitment.
After a long interlude on television (the script “Three Workers” in 1980, “The Adventures of a Photographer” three years later, the research “The Fabulous Sixties” in 1985), Maselli returns to the cinema with four films about the role woman and her «superiority », where psychoanalysis seems to take over the leading role that Marxism had: «Storia d’amore» (1986, which earned Valeria Golino her first Coppa Volpi), «Codice privacy» (1988, only with Ornella Muti on stage ), «The Secret» and «L’alba» (both from 1990 and both interpreted by Nastassja Kinski). With Chronicles of the Third Millennium (1996), the director returns to political themes – the impending demolition of an apartment building drives tenants to mobilize, even if the results are contradictory – but slips into a complacent and unproductive aestheticism. Praising commitment remains the focus of Il Companion (from Pavese, for TV, 1999) and that of the marginalized in Civico 0 (2007), while Frammenti di Novecento (2005) and The red shadows» (2009) attempt to take stock of their lives and their role as intellectuals with at times sincerely self-critical accents, as if they wanted to close a circle that had been opened forty years earlier by «Open Letter».