Ennio Flaiano (5 March 1910 – 20 November 1972) was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, and drama critic. Best known for his work with
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most i ...
, Flaiano co-wrote ten screenplays with the Italian director, including ''
La Strada
''La strada'' () is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini and co-written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple-minded young woman (Giulietta Masina) bought from her mother ...
'' (1954), ''
La Dolce Vita
''La Dolce Vita'' (; Italian for "the sweet life" or "the good life"Kezich, 203) is a 1960 satirical comedy-drama film directed and co-written (with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Brunello Rondi) by Federico Fellini. The film stars Marcell ...
'' (1960), and ''
8½
' (Italian title: , ) is a 1963 surrealist comedy-drama film directed and co-written (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi) by Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on Guido Anselmi, played by M ...
''.
Biography
Flaiano wrote for ''Cineillustrato'', ''
Oggi'', ''
Il Mondo'', ''
Il Corriere della Sera'', ''
Omnibus'' and other prominent Italian newspapers and magazines.
In 1947, he won the
Strega Prize
The Strega Prize ( it, Premio Strega ) is the most prestigious Italian literary award. It has been awarded annually since 1947 for the best work of prose fiction written in the Italian language by an author of any nationality and first published ...
for his novel, ''Tempo di uccidere ''(variously translated as ''Miriam'', ''A Time to Kill'', and ''The Short Cut''). Set in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
during the
Italian invasion (1935–36), the novel tells the story of an Italian officer who rapes and subsequently kills an Ethiopian woman and is then tormented by the memory of his act. The barren landscape around the protagonist hints at an interior emptiness and meaninglessness. This is one of the few Italian literary works dealing with the misdeeds of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa. The novel has been continuously in print for sixty years. A
movie adaptation with the same title, directed by
Giuliano Montaldo
Giuliano Montaldo (born 22 February 1930) is an Italian film director.
Biography
While he was still a young student, Montaldo was recruited by the director Carlo Lizzani for the role of leading actor in the film ''Achtung! Banditi!'' (1951). ...
and starring
Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Kim Coppola (born January 7, 1964), known professionally as Nicolas Cage, is an American actor and film producer. Born into the Coppola family, he is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Gu ...
, was released in 1989.
In 1971, Flaiano suffered a first heart-attack. "All will have to change", he wrote in his notes. He put his many papers in order and published them, although the major part of his memoirs were published posthumously. In November 1972 he began writing various autobiographical pieces for ''
Corriere della Sera
The ''Corriere della Sera'' (; en, "Evening Courier") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average daily circulation of 410,242 copies in December 2015.
First published on 5 March 1876, ''Corriere della Sera'' is one of It ...
''.
On November 20 of the same year, while at a clinic for a check-up, he suffered a second cardiac arrest and died. His daughter Lelè, after a long illness, died at age 40 in 1992. His wife Rosetta Rota, a mathematician and the aunt of mathematician
Gian-Carlo Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, pro ...
, died in 2003.
The entire family is buried together at the Maccarese Cemetery, near Rome.
Flaiano's Rome
Flaiano's name is indissolubly tied to Rome, a city he loved and hated, as he was a caustic witness to its urban evolutions and debacles, its vices and its virtues. In ''
La Solitudine del Satiro,'' Flaiano left numerous passages relating to ''his'' Rome.
In the Montesacro quarter of Rome, the ''LABit'' theatre company placed a commemorative plaque on the facade of the house where he lived from 1952.
Critic
Richard Eder
Richard Gray Eder (August 16, 1932 – November 21, 2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic.
Life and career
For 20 years, he was variously a foreign correspondent, a film reviewer and the drama critic for ''The New York Times''. ...
wrote in ''
Newsday
''Newsday'' is an American daily newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI", and f ...
'': "To read the late Ennio Flaiano is to imagine a bust of
Ovid
Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...
or
Martial
Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial ; March, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD) was a Roman poet from Hispania (modern Spain) best known for his twelve books of ''Epigrams'', published in Rome between AD 86 and ...
, placed in a piazza in Rome and smiling above a traffic jam. In his antic, melancholy irony, Flaiano wrote as if he were time itself, satirizing the present moment."
Literary Style
A fine and ironic moralist, at once tragic and bitter, Flaiano produced narrative works and other prose writings permeated by an original
satiric
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or ...
vein and by a vivid sense of the
grotesque
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...
through which he stigmatised the paradoxical aspects of contemporary reality. He introduced the expression ''saltare sul carro del vincitore'' ("to jump on the winner's chariot") into the
Italian language
Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 m ...
.
In the last section of his book, ''
The Via Veneto Papers'', journalist Giulio Villa Santa included an interview with Flaiano for Swiss-Italian Radio, two weeks before his death. The interview concluded as follows:
Villa Santa: This evening it seems to me, Flaiano, that you have opened yourself up as perhaps you have never done before, that you have revealed an anguish and above all a faith behind your humour. But this gives rise to the suspicion in me that at bottom you are a man from another period if not from another age altogether; is that an unfounded suspicion?
Flaiano: It's a legitimate one. We don’t know who we are, we are just so many passengers without baggage, we are born alone and we die alone. A writer once quoted me in a book of hers, and in the English translation the English writer translated my name as ''Ennius Flaianus'', thinking that this Ennio Flaiano was some Latin author. A few months later we met each other in a restaurant in Rome and were introduced and, naturally, she experienced an awkward moment, for she didn’t think that this ancient writer was still alive. However, we did agree that certain characteristics of my person, a certain style of life, indicated that she was right. I perhaps was not of this age, am not of this age. Perhaps I belong to another world: I feel myself more in harmony when I read Juvenal
Decimus Junius Juvenalis (), known in English as Juvenal ( ), was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the ''Satires''. The details of Juvenal's life ...
, Martial
Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial ; March, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD) was a Roman poet from Hispania (modern Spain) best known for his twelve books of ''Epigrams'', published in Rome between AD 86 and ...
, Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus (; 84 - 54 BCE), often referred to simply as Catullus (, ), was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His s ...
. It's probable that I’m an ancient Roman who is still here, forgotten by history, to write about the things that the others wrote about far better than I – namely, let me repeat, Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus (; 84 - 54 BCE), often referred to simply as Catullus (, ), was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His s ...
, Martial
Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial ; March, between 38 and 41 AD – between 102 and 104 AD) was a Roman poet from Hispania (modern Spain) best known for his twelve books of ''Epigrams'', published in Rome between AD 86 and ...
, Juvenal
Decimus Junius Juvenalis (), known in English as Juvenal ( ), was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the ''Satires''. The details of Juvenal's life ...
. (p. 251)
Flaiano Prize
In 1975, the
Flaiano Prize
The Flaiano Prizes ( it, Premi Flaiano) are a set of Italian international awards recognizing achievements in the fields of creative writing, cinema, theater and radio-television.
Established to honour the Italian author and screenwriter Ennio Flai ...
was created in his honour. Recognizing achievement in cinema, theater, creative writing, and literary criticism, the international prize is awarded annually in Flaiano's hometown of
Pescara
Pescara (; nap, label= Abruzzese, Pescàrë; nap, label= Pescarese, Piscàrë) is the capital city of the Province of Pescara, in the Abruzzo region of Italy. It is the most populated city in Abruzzo, with 119,217 (2018) residents (and approxim ...
.
Quotations
*
Chastity
Chastity, also known as purity, is a virtue related to temperance. Someone who is ''chaste'' refrains either from sexual activity considered immoral or any sexual activity, according to their state of life. In some contexts, for example when mak ...
is the mirage of
obscene
An obscenity is any utterance or act that strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time. It is derived from the Latin ''obscēnus'', ''obscaenus'', "boding ill; disgusting; indecent", of uncertain etymology. Such loaded language can be use ...
people.
* I got so upset I couldn't sleep the whole afternoon.
* If the peoples knew each other better, they would hate each other more.
* In thirty years time Italy won't be like its governments intended, but as its TV dictated.
* In Italy,
fascists
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and th ...
divide themselves into two categories: fascists and antifascists.
* Remorse used to come afterwards in my love stories; now it goes before me.
* Italians are always ready to run to the rescue of the winners.
* Italy is the country where the shortest line between two points is an arabesque.
Bibliography
* ''La guerra spiegata ai poveri'' (1946)
* ''Tempo di uccidere'' (1947)
** ''The Short Cut (The Marlboro Press, 1994 new ed.)
* ''Diario notturno'' (1956)
* ''La donna nell'armadio'' (1958)
* ''Una e una notte'' (1959)
* ''Il gioco e il massacro'' (1970)
* ''Un marziano a Roma'' (1971)
* ''Le ombre bianche'' (1972)
* ''
La solitudine del satiro'' (posthumous, 1973)
** ''
The Via Veneto Papers'' (The Marlboro Press, 1992)
* ''Autobiografia del blu di Prussia'' (posthumous, 1974)
* ''Diario degli errori'' (1977)
Filmography
Flaiano was a successful screenwriter and collaborated on several notable films, including ''
Roma città libera'' (1946), ''
Guardie e ladri
''Cops and Robbers'' ( it, Guardie e ladri) is a 1951 Italian cult comedy film directed by Steno and Mario Monicelli. It stars the famous comedian Totò, and the cinematographer was the future film director Mario Bava. It was produced by Dino De ...
'' (1951), ''
The Woman of Rome
''The Woman from Rome'' ( it, La romana) is a 1947 novel by Alberto Moravia about the intersecting lives of many characters, chief among them a prostitute (whose mother is also a prostitute) and an idealistic intellectual who, after an interrogat ...
'' (1954), ''
Peccato che sia una canaglia
''Too Bad She's Bad'' ( it, Peccato che sia una canaglia) is a 1955 in film, 1955 Cinema of Italy, Italian comedy directed by Alessandro Blasetti. It stars Sophia Loren and is based on Alberto Moravia's story "Fanatico", from his ''Racconti romani ...
'' (1955), ''
La notte
''La Notte'' (; en, "The Night") is a 1961 drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti (with Umberto Eco appearing in a cameo). Filmed on location in Milan, the film is the rela ...
'' (1961), ''
Fantasmi a Roma
''Ghosts of Rome'' ( it, Fantasmi a Roma) is a 1961 Italian comedy film directed by Antonio Pietrangeli. It was released in the UK in 1964 as ''The Phantom Lovers''.
Plot
Count di Roviano refuses to sell his palace to a developer, despite having ...
'' (1961), ''
La decima vittima'' (1965), ''
La cagna'' (1972). With
Tullio Pinelli
Tullio Pinelli (24 June 1908 – 7 March 2009) was an Italian screenwriter known for his work on the Federico Fellini films ''I Vitelloni'', ''La Strada'', '' La Dolce Vita'' and '' 8½''.
Biography
Born in Turin, Piedmont, Italy, Pinelli beg ...
, he co-wrote the screenplays for ten films by
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most i ...
: ''
Variety Lights
''Variety Lights'' ( it, Luci del varietà) is a 1951 Italian romantic drama film produced, directed and written by Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada and starring Peppino De Filippo, Carla Del Poggio, and Giulietta Masina. The film is about a ...
'' (1950), ''
The White Sheik
''The White Sheik'' ( it, Lo sceicco bianco) is a 1952 Italian romantic comedy film directed by Federico Fellini and starring Alberto Sordi, Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo and Giulietta Masina. Written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano a ...
'' (1952), ''
I vitelloni
''I vitelloni'' (, literally "The bullocks" - Romagnol slang for "The slackers" or "The layabouts") is a 1953 comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay written by himself, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It stars Franco ...
'' (1953), ''
La strada
''La strada'' () is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini and co-written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple-minded young woman (Giulietta Masina) bought from her mother ...
'' (1954), ''
Il bidone
''Il bidone'' (, "The Drum .html" ;"title="ontainer/nowiki>">ontainer/nowiki>"; also known as ''The Swindle'' or ''The Swindlers'') is a 1955 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Ennio Flaiano and Tull ...
'' (1955), ''
Nights of Cabiria
''Nights of Cabiria'' ( it, Le notti di Cabiria) is a 1957 drama film co-written and directed by Federico Fellini. It stars Giulietta Masina as Cabiria, a prostitute living in Rome. The cast also features François Périer and Amedeo Nazzari. T ...
'' (1957), ''
La Dolce Vita
''La Dolce Vita'' (; Italian for "the sweet life" or "the good life"Kezich, 203) is a 1960 satirical comedy-drama film directed and co-written (with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Brunello Rondi) by Federico Fellini. The film stars Marcell ...
'' (1960), ''The Temptations of Doctor Antonio'' episode in ''
Boccaccio '70
''Boccaccio '70'' is a 1962 comedy anthology film directed by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Luchino Visconti from an idea by Cesare Zavattini. It consists of four episodes, each by one of the directors, all about a di ...
'' (1962), ''
8½
' (Italian title: , ) is a 1963 surrealist comedy-drama film directed and co-written (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi) by Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on Guido Anselmi, played by M ...
'' (1963), and ''
Juliet of the Spirits
''Juliet of the Spirits'' ( it, Giulietta degli spiriti) is a 1965 fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini and starring Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo, Mario Pisu, Valentina Cortese, and Valeska Gert. The film is about the vi ...
'' (1965).
[Peter Bondanella, ''The Cinema of Federico Fellini'', Princeton University Press, 1992, pages 337–340.]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Flaiano, Ennio
1910 births
1972 deaths
People from Pescara
Italian humorists
Italian male journalists
20th-century Italian screenwriters
Strega Prize winners
20th-century Italian novelists
20th-century Italian male writers
Italian male novelists
Italian male screenwriters
20th-century Italian journalists