Director of a handful of feature films, Gian Luigi Polidoro is mentioned only briefly in film histories despite winning a Golden Bear in Berlin (for Il diavolo, 1963): “He will never create work that goes beyond being an average film tending more towards being a consumer good than a director’s personal vision,” wrote Lino Micciché of him. His name is especially associated with projects with Rodolfo Sonego and the making of a separate version of Satyricon to rival Fellini’s. While waiting for an updated critical view, we can say without uncertainty that his copious documentaries are quality work. Here we focus on a cohesive quintet of shorts made for Astra Cinematografica, most likely with American funding. In a letter to Geo Tapparelli in January of 1955 (kept at the Polidoro archive at the Cineteca di Bologna), the director wrote about a project in Yemen and added the promising remark: “There’s a rather important production company that has licensed exclusive rights to CinemaScope in Italy. With them we would have the opportunity to shoot with this new system. The system consists of an additional lens that can be applied to any camera, even an Arriflex.” The five films we are showing in this section are original 35mm period prints. They are enhanced by CinemaScope as well as by the luster of Ferraniacolor (a color system that was perfect for summer shooting in Italy but quite problematic for darker interiors) and the dense sound of four magnetic tracks. With such a framework, it is to be expected that the documentary pays more attention to a spectacular reconstruction rather than perfectly precise information. And so it was. The Sardinia of La corsa della rocca and Terra di pastori, the Venetian islands of Gente della laguna and Isole e barene, the Sicilian marionette theater of La spada di Orlando are all a celebration of color and sound. Polidoro, however, emerges from them as a true director: gifted for sophisticated pictorial sensitivity, accustomed to the vast spaces of westerns, spare in his storytelling, perceptive in his choice of details, and a strategist of free camera movements.

Andrea Meneghelli