“The Important Thing is the Fusion”: Giuseppe Marotta and Film Criticism

Abstract

Novelist, screenwriter, dramaturgist, lyricist and journalist, from the late Twenties, Giuseppe Marotta also worked as a film critic for many magazines. However, he definitively established himself as a critic in 1954, when he started his collaboration with the column of the news magazine L'Europeo. Mixing analysis, autobiographical account and narration, the film review acquired, with Marotta, an original and unconventional nature. The hyperbolically ironic style, the recourse to digression as well as to a richly elaborated phrasing characterized his reflection on cinema, which combined the desire to affirm the autonomy of cinematographic language, to oppose the narrative strategies of neorealism and to promote a cinema freed both from the features of popular film production and from the more mannered forms of authorship.