Vittorio
Cottafavi
An alpinist in his teenage years, Vittorio Cottafavi (1914–1998) first took up photography to record his and his friends’ expeditions. After experimenting with music, literature and painting, he quit his law degree and enrolled at the newly-created Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1935. He then worked as a screenwriter and assistant, notably to Vittorio De Sica, who helped get him hired for I nostri sogni, his directorial debut, in 1943. Unable to work in the dire conditions of Italian cinema after the war, Cottafavi established Migliaresi Editore, publishing translations of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, and Melville, among others. His sophomore feature, Fiamma che non si spegne, only came in 1949. Its disastrous reception at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Cottafavi accused of fascism and the film effectively kicked out of the competition, killed any possibility of Cottafavi’s career as an auteur and sentenced him to work in popular genres: melodrama, swashbuckler, pepla. After around twenty productions and several unrealized projects, Cottafavi ended his cinematic career with the box-office failure of I cento cavalieri in 1964. In the meantime, he had started working for RAI, mostly adapting classical plays and novels, and he went on to direct more than sixty TV productions between 1957 and 1985.