Italian artist who was a pioneer of British cinema
Lorenza Mazzetti 1928-2020
Lorenza Mazzetti, who has died aged 91, earned a place in British cinema history in the 1950s when she co-founded the Free Cinema documentary movement, a precursor to the British New Wave. Its films were typically shot in black and white, using hand-held cameras, and focused on everyday, mainly working-class British subjects that their makers felt were overlooked by the mainstream industry. Mazzetti’s best known film, Together, won a prize at Cannes in 1956, but while her three collaborators in the movement – Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson – went on to make some of the seminal films of the 1960s, Mazzetti moved back to Italy, where she became better known as a writer and painter.
Lorenza Mazzetti was born in Rome in 1928. After her mother died, she and her twin sister were sent to Tuscany, where they were raised by an aunt who was married to Robert Einstein, a cousin of Albert. She remembered her childhood as a happy one until the summer of 1944, when the SS slaughtered her aunt and her two cousins. Robert was not at home at the time, but killed himself a year later. Mazzetti was deeply traumatised. After the War, she studied at the University of Florence, then moved to London, where she worked as a waitress. Finding that she enjoyed drawing, she applied to the Slade School. “You must let me in, because I am a genius,” she told its director, William Coldstream.
At the Slade she “liberated” some film-making equipment to make a film based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. On discovering the theft, Coldstream threatened to call the police, but was interested to see what she had produced: the result was so impressive that Denis Forman, the director of the British Film Institute, gave her a grant to make Together. Filmed on location, it stars the artists Edouardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews as profoundly deaf brothers who work as dockers in the bomb-ravaged East End. It was a sensation when it was screened as part of the Free Cinema programme in 1956, but soon after, Mazzetti returned to Italy to visit her sister, and fell into a depression. She never worked in the UK again, but she remained on good terms with her friends from the British film world. She wrote several books, including the bestselling Il cielo cade ( The Sky Falls); exhibited her paintings; and for many years ran a popular puppet theatre in Rome.