Restorations of Parliamo del naso, Lezioni di anatomia and L’esperienza del cubismo were completed in 2003 by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Restoration was based on original 35mm negatives (except for a 17.5mm sound negative for Parliamo del naso) held at the Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema – Cineteca Nazionale, thanks to the kind authorization of Cristaldi Film. Restoration of La gente non ci guarda was completed in 2003 by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, using original picture (35mm) and sound (17.5mm) negatives held at the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana.

Anatomia and Cubismo are artist films. Two foreign bodies within Italian cinema of the postwar era (but also before and after it). Not two small works, but two gems by an author of rare intelligence, and at the same time of the aristocracy and graphics of Lux. These are objects of the purest design, in which all the materials necessary for their realization (the models, robots, and mechanical skeletons in Anatomia; the original drawings, storyboards, frameworks, positives and negatives for Cubismo) are worthy of appearing in a Gualino-style home museum. Something entirely different from a documentary made in and for itself by a contractor who will take home, in agreement with Lux, a swindling 3%. Something entirely different from the work of a youth who has to eat that night and make it to the end of the month, and who will have to wait four more years before he meets Alberto Sordi and puts himself body and soul at the service of the actor. Anatomia and Cubismo are two works that have no relation whatsoever to current thought, to the books, films, discourses, and ideas, either of the government or the opposition, that circulated in Italy between 1949-1950. The first is a Darwinian, positivist lesson that sent the Vatican off its rocker. The second is a reflection on Picasso made through the hand and brush of Guttuso, who frequented filmmakers’ haunts, designed the most commercially successful Italian film poster in the world (Riso amaro, Lux film), and who obviously didn’t scorn the semi-heretical Sonego. Il Naso is a mere trifle, falsely erudite. There is the pretense of joking or meditating on Gualino’s hawk nose (or Sonego’s beak), just to satisfy the educated gentleman on the second floor at Lux who handed the papers upstairs. The case of Bologna’s city playschools (La gente non ci guarda) was entirely different. This municipal propaganda documentary was refused its censorship certificate under the pretext of missing a tax payment for music. Its eleven short minutes speak of the great political clash in those years in terms not of good government, but of administrative utopia. It speaks of childhood and Bologna as oases of happiness within life and the nation. It is proof of the moral tension and the civilized Bolognese cinema that gravitated around Renzo Renzi. Two young filmmakers, Sonego and Pellegrini, who right around that time were called to work on the most mammoth, realist socialist opus ever produced by a western communist party (“Togliatti è tornato”, November 1948, by Carlo Lizzani), proved they could also see things with new eyes.

Tatti Sanguineti