JOSC 5 (1) pp. 101–123 Intellect Limited 2014 Journal of Screenwriting Volume 5 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.5.1.101_1 Paolo Russo Oxford Brookes University The ‘De Santis case’: Screenwriting, political boycott and archival research Abstract Keywords In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s writer-director Giuseppe De Santis Giuseppe De Santis was the most successful Italian film-maker worldwide, thanks to box-office hits like writer-director the Oscar-nominated Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949). However, endless rows with archives producers, distributors and censorship soon forced him into professional exile until unfinished projects his creative voice was completely silenced. Over the years De Santis denounced a political boycott systematic boycott against him because of his social and political commitment. All censorship scripts needed the central government film office approval; this system enforced a form of pre-emptive censorship by controlling the writing and packaging process. This article unveils the findings of comprehensive research conducted at the De Santis Fund in Rome. While De Santis’s official filmography lists only one title in the last 33 years of his life, his archive contains dozens of treatments and full scripts (and the film-maker’s correspondence) adding up to a total of almost 50 projects that were never made. The materials analysed here not only allow a thorough re-write of De Santis’s career, but also shed light on the intricate relations between politics and the Italian film industry in the post-war years. 101 JOSC_5.1_Russo_101-123.indd 101 7/24/13 2:07:46 PM Paolo Russo 1. With the notable When I am dead I’d like to be remembered not only for the films I made exception of Antonio Vitti’s volume (1996), but also for all the countless projects I was kept from doing. De Santis’s cinema (Giuseppe De Santis in Castaldini 1995: 5) remains vastly unexplored outside of Italy. This also explains why most of the references used for this Introduction article are in Italian. This article is based on research I have conducted at the Fondo De Santis (hence- 2. An interesting forth, De Santis Fund). The Fund includes the film-maker’s personal archives website in the form of an ongoing survey currently housed at the Chiarini Library at the CSC-Centro Sperimentale di on unproduced Cinematografia in Cinecittà, Rome. While my initial aim is to investigate and film projects is: ‘Unproduced and re-evaluate the career of a film-maker whose forced inactivity confined him to Unfinished Films: An a lifetime of scriptwriting, I also intend to show how archival research and the Ongoing Film Comment study of unfinished screenplays and other manuscripts can shed light on and project’. Available at: http://www. help to understand the intricate relations between politics and the film industry filmcomment.com/ thus balancing between the historical, the industrial/institutional and, at least in article/unproduced- part, the conceptual research trajectories outlined by Maras (2011). and-unfinished-films-a- ongoing-film-comment- Giuseppe De Santis is one of the most neglected writer-directors by schol- project. Accessed ars of the golden age of Italian post-World War II cinema, especially outside 25 February 2013. Italy.1 In his films, he made systematic use of a new, glamourized star system 3. Vitti’s extensive volume that launched, among others, Silvana Mangano, Lucia Bosè and Raf Vallone; (2006) in particular includes transcripts his narratives were articulated around socially committed themes through a of De Santis’s lectures typical rendition of classical Hollywood genres (western, melodrama, musi- and conferences in the cal). By 1959, all of De Santis’s films had been distributed worldwide (in both USA in the early 1990s and other articles, western and eastern bloc countries): he was nominated twice to an Academy interviews and essays. Award: Riso amaro/Bitter Rice for Best Writing in 1951, and Cesta duga godinu Only one chapter dana/The Year Long Road for Best Foreign Language Film in 1959. He won a though addresses some of the issues related to Golden Globe (The Year Long Road), and a Silver Ribbon (Best Director for De Santis’s career but Caccia tragica/The Tragic Pursuit (1946) in 1947), and was nominated for a limited to just a few of the projects housed in Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Festival (again for The Tragic Pursuit). the Fund. Despite his huge success and popularity both in Italy and abroad, after one last large-scale production in the Soviet Union (Italiani brava gente/Attack and Retreat, 1964) De Santis only managed to make one minor film in 1972 and none in the last 25 years of his life. The history of cinema is paved with unfinished or even doomed projects – Luchino Visconti’s and Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter’s attempted adaptations of Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, Fellini’s The Voyage of G. Mastorna, Alain Resnais’ The Adventures of Harry Dickson, Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and Don Quixote, Kubrick’s Napoleon and A.I., to name just a few.2 However, with the notable exception of Welles, these were all individual cases in otherwise long and successful careers. For De Santis, no longer being able to make films became a permanent status. By the time a few scholarly publications first tackled the issue at the turn of the 1980s his forcibly interrupted career had already been branded ‘the De Santis case’ (Farassino 1978; Camerino 1982; Parisi 1983). De Santis’s death in 1997 revived the inter- est in the film-maker’s work but only a few scholars focused their attention on some of the unfinished projects (Toffetti 1996; Grossi and Spagnoletti 1997; Farassino 2002; Vitti 2006).3 None attempts a thorough examination of all the scripts and documents available in the Fund; none attempts a really system- atic collation between primary and secondary sources in order to investigate the reasons behind ‘the De Santis case’ in a comprehensive way, which is what I purport to do in this article. 102 JOSC_5.1_Russo_101-123.indd 102 7/24/13 2:07:47 PM The ‘De Santis case’ 4. It must be noted that the distinction between short and full or draft treatment is easily blurred in De Santis’s case as most of his short treatments are very detailed with a strong narrative structure already outlined by scenes. 5. Additional secondary sources mention 15 further projects. Because no related primary material or corroborating evidence was found, they are not included in this study. Figure 1: Press release by the International Film Committee of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announcing The Year Long Road (1957) among the Golden Globe winners (listed at number 3, incorrectly titled as The Road a Year Long) (1959; courtesy: CSC-Biblioteca Chiarini, Gordana Miletic De Santis). A tally of just the unfinished projects reveals that the collection of the De Santis Fund comprises 102 mostly typewritten manuscripts dating as far back as 1943. Of these: • Four are brief outlines in the form of collected notes (three projects) • 39 are short treatments or story synopsis (twenty projects) • 27 are full/long treatments (twelve projects)4 • 32 are full screenplay drafts (ten projects) A good number of these manuscripts include handwritten annotations, amendments, revisions, hand-drawn camera setups and, only a few, esti- mated budgets. They refer to a total of 29 different projects, all originated by De Santis mostly as feature films or, in a few instances starting from the 1970s, television movies and serials. At least ten went through complete devel- opment and quite a few reached a significant stage of pre-production. The Fund also includes De Santis’s correspondence (from 1936 to 1996), provid- ing information about twenty more titles, not originated by, but proposed to or involving De Santis, mainly outside Italy. Overall, the archive shows that De Santis worked on, or was involved at various stages in the development of 49 unfinished or potential projects.5 The market argument vs the political boycott argument The reasons usually advocated in relation to the ‘case’ can be summed up by two antithetical positions: De Santis being unable to keep up and to conform with the mechanisms and the demand of a fast evolving film market; or, De Santis being the targeted victim of a methodical political boycott. 103 JOSC_5.1_Russo_101-123.indd 103 7/24/13 2:07:48 PM Paolo Russo 6. All De Santis’s films Emphasizing the market argument, scholars like Rossi (1982: 67), Parisi released between 1949 (Bitter Rice) and (1983: 184) and Zagarrio (2002a: 36, 2002b: 49) point out that De Santis kept 1956 (Men and Wolves) insisting on the same subjects and characters – i.e. marginalized groups and totalled between 270 the working class through socially committed themes – while, more and and 405 million ITL (roughly the equivalent more, the emerging modernist cinema depicted the aspirations and the angst of nowadays 8.5-13 of Italy’s middle class during the post-war controversial Economic Miracle million Euros) at the years. De Santis was initially very critical of this cinema of ‘subjectivity’ and domestic box-office only. modern alienation that, in his own opinion, had betrayed the original spirit of Neorealism by shifting its focus from the lower classes to the world of the bourgeoisie, as was typical of the pre-war films he so stingingly flayed as a critic (De Santis 1951: 109–12; 1962: 30; Farassino 1984: 60). With hind- sight, De Santis also conceded in some interviews that he somehow failed to acknowledge the need to update his storytelling by enriching his characters with more psychological introspection (Zanelli 1982: 90–91; Costa 1982: 65).