Cecilia Mangini
Biography
Mola di Bari, 31 July 1927 – Rome, 21 January 2021
Regarded as the first documentary filmmaker in the history of postwar Italian cinema , Cecilia Mangini moved with her parents at an early age from Puglia to Florence. In the Tuscan capital she grew up in a culturally stimulating environment and received an education that, for a woman at the time, could not be taken for granted.
Unbeknown to her mother, during her high school years she had the opportunity to assiduously participate in the Cineguf (film clubs organised by the Fascist University Groups). Here she discovered her love for the seventh art, which led her to enrol after the war in the Primi Piani film club. A ‘school of participation’ that helped her to develop her own critical and aesthetic sense, as well as acquire a political sensibility, the Florentine film club provided her with the chance to establish relations with the intellectual circles that gravitated around cinema at the time. This was reinforced by her contact with the headquarters in Rome, where she moved in 1952.
Called in by critic Callisto Cosulich, who was then leading the FICC (Italian Federation of Film Clubs), Mangini was placed in charge of programming at the national level of the film clubs that remained faithful to the Italian Communist Party after the defeat of the left in 1948. It was in this context that she met Lino Del Fra with whom she developed a deep understanding and who would become her life and work companion. In the 1950s, Mangini gradually transformed her passion for film into a professional career that led her to become a director. Writing articles for ‘Cinema Nuovo’ and other specialised magazines, and working as a photojournalist, under the inspiration of Zavattini’s ‘stalking the real’, weere formative experiences that led her to what would become her chosen art form: the documentary.
In a search of new filmmakers, producer Fulvio Lucisano suggested to Mangini that she should get behind the camera, realising her ‘very strong urge… to try her luck’ at direction. For Ignoti alla città (Kids in the Slums of Rome,1958), her debut, for Stendalì, suonano ancora (1960) and for La canta delle marane (1960), she collaborated with Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote the voice-over texts commenting the images.
In the first half of the 1960s, Mangini wrote and directed, together with Lino Del Fra, two feature films on the great ideologies of the twentieth century – All’armi, siamo facsisti! (To Arms, We’re Fascists, 1962) and La statua di Stalin (The Statue of Stalin,1963) – the former in choreography with Lino Micciché, both with the collaboration of Franco Fortini. If the film on the rise and fall of the fascist regime was an unprecedented success in the country for the genre, the documentary on the phenomenon of Stalinism suffered such manipulations and cuts by the producer – the title became Processo a Stalin (The Trial of Stalin) – that the authors were forced to withdraw their names from the film.
During the 1960s a trend began to manifest itself that would unfortunately become constant in Mangini’s directorial history: the increasing obstacles to the distribution of her films in Italy due to censorship. Commissioned by the Italian Communist Party ahead of local elections, Essere donne (Being Women, 1964), an investigative documentary on the condition of women workers, was excluded from compulsory programming.
Marked by the growing monopoly of the RAI and the advent of private television, the film and media landscape of the 1970s and the following decade put unconventional fil-makers like Mangini under even more strain. Many of her projects were never even made, as the archival documentation testifies. Only a few short films were completed and distributed in cinemas. Most of her activity therefore entailed writing treatments and screenplays for other authors or creative participation in feature films directed by Lino Del Fra.
In 2012, the filmmaker returned to making documentaries after a long creative silence. Availing herself of collaborators such as Mariangela Barbanente and Paolo Pisanelli, Mangini doubled up, putting herself both behind and in front of the camera. Her aim was to reinterpret the places and battles of a lifetime of political and cultural engagement in the light of events in the 21st century: In viaggio con Cecilia (On the Road with Cecilia, 2014), Due scatole dimenticate – Un viaggio in Vietnam (Two Forgotten Boxes – Journey to Vietnam, 2020), Il mondo a scatti (A World of Snaps, 2021) e Grazia Deledda, la rivoluzionaria (Grazia Deledda, the Revolutionary, 2021).
