01  SUMMER 2025

NARROW MARGIN EDITORIAL NOTE: In 1949, after the presentation of Fiamma che non si spegne at the Venice Film Festival, a group of thirty critics and journalists wrote a letter to the Festival’s president, the Christian Democrat Giovani Ponti, asking for it to be removed from competition for fascist apologia. In this interview, Cottafavi recalls these well-documented events and disputes the accusation. The full letter reads as such: ‘The Italian film writers and journalists listed below, after having seen the film Fiamma che non si spegne, having unanimously identified in it the extremes of a re-evaluation of the fascist war and a distortion of the fight for liberation, which have induced part of the audience to act out neo-fascist demonstrations during and after the projection, protest against the inclusion of such a work in an international Festival of film art, which gravely jeopardizes the prestige of the host Nation. They ask therefore for the film not to be submitted to the Jury’s consideration and that the authorities examine if it does not contain the extremes of an offence of fascist apologia.’ ^[1]

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Vittorio Cottafavi: The fascists never impressed me: from a particular distance, they always seemed like buffoons. On the other hand, the fall of Salò impressed me very much. I always likened this fall to something that had happened many centuries before and that was never sufficiently taken into consideration: Aeschylus’ The Persians, an extraordinary work which I had the pleasure of directing. A work that was snubbed by Greek-Roman-Italiot criticism without a single intellectual realizing that for the first time in the history of mankind someone had fought against the Persians and had been their chronicler in battle, thus creating a myth. The Persians was written almost simultaneously to its events: the birth of a ‘live’ tragedy.

General Franco Navarra Viggiani was a man who perhaps was something of a pederast. Maybe. In the good sense of the word: he wanted to help those young and good. Good according to him, naturally. Once, when fixating on one of the ‘goods’, he became fixated on me, son of a general of the Italian alpine troops. When searching for a subject that wasn’t like ‘all this infamy, this filth, this cowardice, and that would return to us the pride of being Italian’, Navarra Viggiani suggested [his short story] Itala gens to me. ‘Itala gens, children who do not ruin virginal sweetness…’: everything was thus conceived by the general, Oreste Biancoli and Giuliano Conte [who are also credited as producers] — a music teacher who was a protégé of the general and who, as people say, had some weaknesses. I went to the root of it all and told the general: ‘General, we can’t make a film like this’, ‘I won’t do it, it’s full of nonsense’. The general considered this stance of mine a betrayal: ‘But I’ve spent so many millions…’, and I said, ‘That’s too bad, because you shouldn’t spend a single lira on stuff like this. But I swear to you in the name of God that if you let me do the story as I say, I won’t stop, not even for a minute — I’ll start now and we’ll move on!’. The story of Salvo D’Acquisto had all the elements needed to develop the film without requiring any extraordinary changes. I went to work with the playwright Siro Angeli and with Giorgio Capitani, and we wrote a satisfying draft. Actually, it didn’t satisfy me that much: it was too sentimental and too complicated. The most beautiful thing I had conceived up to then was the marriage sequence at night in the small town: Salvo is called to arms, gets his license and goes to get married. It was still too slight to make a film, and I knuckled down to put all the elements together, including Salvo’s passion for horses. He loves horses, and instead they stick him in an office in the barracks. Jokingly, the sergeant tells him: ‘Good, the chair can be your horse!’. I also rewrote the film later, in the dressing room at Scalera [studios], while filming with Leonardo Cortese [who plays Giuseppe Manfredi], who didn’t believe in the film. The fact that I could film and deliver a product of a certain quality finally made General Viggiani understand that it was better to leave the teacher Conte aside.

An integral part of the Venetian bloodbath and massacre is the music — which I had worked on myself, researching musical themes at General Viggiani’s villa. It turned out that the march of Prince Eugene of Savoy was the most fitting one. It is a very, very beautiful eighteenth-century march. It was me who decided to put it in. Among other issues, the thing also created a bunch of problems with the carabinieri who were always in our way. ‘But this isn’t the army’s anthem!’. The title was my invention. Actually, I pronounce it ‘Fiamma che non si spenge’ [Tuscan dialect]. It comes from the fact that on the army’s caps you have the little bomb with the flames and so Fiamma che non si spegne [‘The flame that never dies’] came to my mind. When Navarra Viggiani heard it, he got really excited: ‘Fiamma, che non si spegne. Italia, Italia’. And so, faced with this rhetoric, I had to make some fun out of it: ‘the flame that never dies is Butangas [natural gas distributor]!’

[Vittorio’s wife] Manuela Cottafavi: Venice, 1949. There was plenty of applause in the room during the avant-premiere for the press. So much. After the projection, Cesare Zavattini — how could I forget him? He was one of the few I knew — said wonderful things: ‘Wooow, braaavo Vittooorioo... One really feels the old Emilian spirit! [referring to Emilia-Romagna, the region of Italy where Cottafavi is from]’. He was almost speaking in dialect, it was so sweet. Then a great confusion, people coming and going. We go back to the hotel, we’re having lunch together in the hall. Zavattini returns with two guys by his side: ‘Cottafavi, I must say however that I completely disagree with you…’.

VC: What hadn’t pleased him? The German who gave an apple to Salvo? The priest [Siro Angeli] who ran faster than everybody else amid the dust, surpassing them all?

MC: I was outside the room: a big confusion. The journalists were very agitated. Someone even had to be restrained, I think. There was also a young critic from Trieste [Tulio Kezich] who has since had an extraordinary career and who signed the letter with conviction, without even having seen the film... Two years ago, in Locarno, this former young man saw the film and then went running to Vittorio in a very dramatic way, screaming ‘Vittorio, forgive me! Forgive me!’. I found this gesture very kind. ^[2]

VC: There was a battle to convince Bontempelli [Massimo Bontempelli, poet, writer, politician] to sign the letter of the thirty. And what happened fifteen days after that? Bontempelli, a communist senator, was expelled from the Senate for fascist apologia. Indeed, he’d celebrated fascist apologia in a few school textbooks he’d written [before the war]. [Guido] Aristarco? To him I administered a faina de castigo. Do you know anything about bulls? The faina de castigo is a tactic used by the bullfighter to destroy the bull by exhaustion, wearing him out. I always ignored Aristarco. When he wrote to me asking for some pictures, I didn’t send them. But once, after Maria Zef, when I was invited to speak at the Università di Roma in a seminar on cinematographic language where he was also present, I began with a few words, deep, heartfelt words: ‘See, dear students, Maria Zef is the second film in the history of Italian cinema to be spoken entirely in dialect. Rather, it is a rhymed film. I had the inspiration and the idea for it after Luchino Visconti shot La terra trema’. All true, all fair. Then I allowed myself a very small critical observation: ‘Luchino Visconti takes two hours to make a fisherman from Aci Trezza unpack his bag. What fisherman ever had a bag so full?’. And Aristarco, quiet, serious, with his haughtiness. He is a fine character. I love him.

When Fiamma che non si spegne was released in Rome, the papers didn’t publish any reviews of it so as to oppose it. They wiped me out. I went to see it one afternoon together with the audience of the Supercinema and I confirmed to myself that I liked it even more. I should add that I nostri sogni already had barely had any reviews, and had had only a small bit of space in the papers.

MC: Vittorio suffered a lot, but he never reacted.

VC: Yes, I was also accused of not reacting, of excessive pride and aristocratic detachment. My motto in those circumstances was: noli me tangere. Was it D’Annunzio, the one with the noli me tangere? ^[3] But the problem is that some scenes in the film were really beautiful and I was absolutely aware of that. My pride and my stubbornness are those of Emilian peasants. I am an Emilian peasant. Rather, I feel like a descendent of the Etruscans. The Etruscans gave birth to our race. The Etruscans first occupied a land and then decided whether it was good for agriculture or not. On a personal level, nothing changed for me. On a moral level, yes. I went back to the countryside to hoe the fields. And then I returned to those awful serial novels: Una donna ha ucciso, Una donna libera, Traviata 53, which the French like.

But here’s where my luck became fascist: in my encounter with Giorgio Venturini — he who’d tried to send Italian cinema to Venice after 8th September. ^[4] They sent them all up. The others, not me. Giorgio Venturini, because of his artistic (or fascistic, I wouldn’t know) admiration for me, suggested that I make films for him. I’m thankful to him for making me shoot films — almost all of them bad actually, at least until Traviata 53 — films whose production demanded a certain courage from Venturini. He had this motto, ‘Few, damned and quick!’, but, as former General Director for Cinema [a branch of the Italian ministry of culture which promotes cinematographic production in the country], he managed to arrange the films. I’d already worked with him at the time when I was assistant to [Francesco] De Robertis in Fantasmi del mare, a film which, despite its title [literally, ‘Ghosts of the sea’], was mostly shot in Milan [which is landlocked]. I’d also done some short films for Venturini which had the objective of gathering funds for the Christian Democrats without ever really showing the DC [Democrazia Cristiana, the Italian Christian Democratic party]. It was Luigi Gedda’s [president of DC] Civic Committees, for whom I shot two or three of these ten-minute short films. These films have all been destroyed, so I can talk about them peacefully. For the first time, I think. They were ten-, fifteen-minute films, made under the slogan: Vote for whomever you want, but vote well! Or rather, Vote for whomever you want, but you must vote. Gedda, who’d just come from, among other things, the failure that was Fabiola [dir. Alessandro Blasetti, 1949; a Christian film] had obviously understood that they could lose the elections because of massive abstentions. I’d filmed in Gianicolo [a park in Rome] this scene where all the statues talked and discussed with one another. Then there was one with Garibaldi and the De Rege brothers [a comic duo] and their little scene with their blah-blah-blah. Antonioni also shot a couple of these short films for Gedda produced by Venturini.

From Ai poeti non si spara: Vittorio Cottafavi tra cinema e televisione (Edizione Cineteca di Bologna, 2010), pp. 130–133. These statements were recorded by Tatti Sanguineti in July 1994 and originally appeared under
the title ‘Il figlio del generale e il carabiniere — Intervista a Vittorio e Maunela Cottafavi’ in the catalogue of the 24th International Film Festival of Taormina (Industria poligrafica della Sicilia, 1994).