Seminal film-maker whose work was influenced by wartime family killings
‘I’m not a writer, I’ve written books. I’m not a painter, I’ve painted pictures. I’m not a director, I’ve made films,’’ Lorenza Mazzetti maintained. This was in part modesty and in part an affirmation of her freedom to express herself as she wanted.
The other side of the coin was that, while her work was often highly regarded, the lack of a single focus meant she tended to be crowded out by starrier names. This was as true in Britain as it was in her native Italy for, although her contribution was later overlooked, in London in the 1950s she had been a pioneer of socially realistic cinema alongside friends such as Lindsay
Anderson and
Tony Richardson. She was believed to have been the first woman to direct a British film made with public money.
Much of Mazzetti’s creative output, indeed much of her life, was shaped by early, brutal tragedy. Lorenza and her twin sister, Paola, were born in Rome in 1927, but their mother, Olga, died soon after their birth.
Their father, Corrado, an insurance agent, entrusted them first to a family friend, the futurist painter Ugo Giannattasio, before they were adopted at 7 by their father’s sister, Nina. She had studied in Germany, where she met and married Robert Einstein, a cousin of the physicist.
Robert had moved his wireless factory to Italy and, after selling it, had bought a villa and farm at Rignano sull’Arno, outside Florence. There the twins grew up happily with their cousins, Anna Maria and Luce.
During the war, however, German officers were billeted with them. Then, on August 3, 1944, as the Wehrmacht began to retreat north, the SS came looking for Robert. Believing he was the only one in danger, he took to the woods. Locked in a cellar, Lorenza and Paola heard shots outside and when they managed to get free found the bodies of their aunt and cousins, apparently victims of an order by Hitler to exterminate Einstein’s blood relations. Demented by grief, Robert took his own life the next year.
The massacre of Mazzetti’s family was to remain for decades the rawest of wounds. Yet she started studying at the University of Florence soon after and, believing that she and Paola were well off after inheriting their uncle’s property, travelled to postwar England in search of new experiences. The first words of greeting that she received, stamped in her passport at Dover, were ‘‘Undesirable Alien’’.
Heading to London, she found a waitressing job in Charing Cross and set about exploring the strange, silent, foggy city. In her diaries, she recorded with the eye of one hungry for life experiences such as her first taste of cornflakes: ‘‘It seems so wonderful that I’m beside myself with joy!’’
Finding that she enjoyed painting, she went to enrol at the Slade art school. There was only the little matter of the fees, which she could not afford. ‘‘You must let me in because I am a genius!’’ she told the director, William Coldstream. The phrase became an oft-repeated story about her and was the title of a 2016 Italian documentary about her life.
The teachers at the Slade included Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud. However, Mazzetti had decided that, identifying with its protagonist as an innocent victim, she wanted to make a film based on Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis. Freud praised her raw yet evident talent in the resulting K (1954), as did Denis Forman, director of the British Film Institute. He was so impressed that he gave her a grant to make Together.
This caused a sensation when shown in 1956 as the first film in the Free Cinema programme. Shot in a documentary style, without dialogue, it depicts the lives of two deaf-mute dockers in the East End of London.
At the least it stands as a vivid record of the area at the time – the men are taunted by gangs of children and eventually overtaken by tragedy. The film won a prize at the Cannes festival.
Free Cinema was a movement founded by Mazzetti with Anderson (who helped to edit Together), Richardson and Karel Reisz at the cafe where she worked. Its manifesto committed them to making films free from commercial considerations and escapist appeal, focusing on real, working-class life. This approach would influence many films of the era, not least those with which the trio of men were soon to make their names, among them Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life.
Yet Mazzetti’s life took a different turn. When she went back to Italy to see her sister in 1956, she found that being there awakened the memories of the war she had suppressed and she fell into a depression. She eventually emerged from this through psychotherapy – her sister was a psychologist – and by cathartically recording her childhood in what was ostensibly a novel.
Il cielo cade (The Sky Falls, 1962) is written in the voice of a girl, Penny, who unquestioningly loves Christ, her uncle and Mussolini, which makes the violent events at the end the more shocking. The book won the prestigious Premio Viareggio literary prize for the best first work. It is now regarded as a classic of its kind, and was filmed in 2000 with Isabella Rossellini.
She wrote a sequel, Con rabbia (Rage), in 1963, and several more books, having renounced cinema as too much trouble. Nonetheless, she kept up her film friendships. She had married Bruno Grieco, a journalist, and their flat in Rome hosted Richard Harris, Claire Bloom, Malcolm McDowell, Rod Steiger, Agnes Varda, Marguerite Duras and their like.
She remained friendly, too, with Forman. Mazzetti liked to recall how at one of their first meetings she had been mortified when she had spilt boiling tea on his leg, only for Sir Denis to reveal it was wooden – he had lost the original during the fighting at Monte Cassino.
For many years she ran a puppet theatre in Rome, helped by her second husband Luigi Galletti, a surgeon, whom she married in 1974. He died in 1999 and she had no children. Latterly, she had many exhibitions of her paintings, some of which dealt with the war, and remained inseparable from her sister, with whom she lived in Rome.
No-one was ever convicted of the murder of their family, but Mazzetti did not lose hope that justice would be served and in recent years believed that she had identified online one of the German officers involved.
– The Times
‘‘You must let me in because I am a genius!’’ she told the Slade art school director, William Coldstream.