The Organizer
| The Organizer | |
|---|---|
 French poster |
|
| Directed by | Mario Monicelli |
| Produced by | Franco Cristaldi |
| Written by | Mario Monicelli Age & Scarpelli |
| Starring | Marcello Mastroianni Renato Salvatori Annie Girardot Folco Lulli Gabriella Giorgelli Raffaella Carrà |
| Music by | Carlo Rustichelli |
| Cinematography | Giuseppe Rotunno |
| Editing by | Ruggero Mastroianni |
| Release date(s) | October 25, 1963 |
| Running time | 128 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
The Organizer (Italian: I compagni) is a 1963 Italian drama film directed by Mario Monicelli about a group of factory workers in Turin who go on strike.[1] The film had its premiere at the 35th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party.[2] The script was nominated for the Academy Award.
Plot
The story of exploited textile factory workers in Turin, Italy at the turn of the century and their beginnings of their fight for better working conditions. Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni) helps the workers organize their strike and give form to their struggle.
Cast
- Marcello Mastroianni - Professor Sinigaglia
- Renato Salvatori - Raoul
- Gabriella Giorgelli - Adele
- Folco Lulli - Pautasso
- Bernard Blier - Martinetti
- Raffaella Carrà - Bianca
- François Périer - Maestro Di Meo
- Vittorio Sanipoli - Baudet
- Mario Pisu - Manager
- Kenneth Kove - Luigi
- Annie Girardot - Niobe
- Edda Ferronao - Maria
- Anna Di Silvio - Gesummina
- Roberto Diamanti
- Elvira Tonelli - Cesarina
Background
Italy’s first capital after the Risorgimento ended in the 1870s, Turin was in the midst of rapid industrialization during the period of The Organizer, although the film unfolds some years before the growth of the industry. Populating his densely inhabited film with actual workers, Monicelli was attempting, three years before The Battle of Algiers (1966), to create a sort of neorealist period piece; using a strategy that would subsequently be seen in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Organizer opens with a montage of historical photographs that skillfully segues into contemporary facsimiles.[2]
Style
Inspired, according to its director, by the revolutionary ghosts of Paris’s no longer extant Bastille and set in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Turin, the film accepts what the influential Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci saw as “the challenge of modernity,” namely, “to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” To that end, The Organizer is variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and baffling, as Monicelli applies the tonal shifts associated with the French New Wave to a straightforward saga of working-class solidarity. Notable for its period detail and Giuseppe Rotunno’s accomplished faux-daguerreotype cinematography, the film is not so much a call to action as to recollection—both a historical monument and a taboo-breaking depiction of a specific moment. Throughout, Rotunno’s black-and-white cinematography makes evocative use of flat lighting and gray skies to accentuate the sense of soot and smoke. (Because little was left of nineteenth-century Turin, the movie was actually shot in the nearby Piedmontese cities of Cuneo, Fossano, and Savigliano, with the vast factory interior filmed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia.)[3]
References
- ^ "NY Times: The Organizer". NY Times.com. Retrieved 2009-03-22.
- ^ a b Hoberman, J. "Criterion Collection Essay". Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ Hoberman, J. "The Organizer: Description of a Struggle". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
External links
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