by Isabella Weber
This year Noir in Festival has created a new prize, the Luca Svizzeretto Award, named after a journalist, friend and collaborator with Noir who left us after a courageous fight against Crohn disease. The first film figure to win this first award of its kind is Enzo Castellari, a film legend in Italy, known abroad mainly for his film The Inglorious Bastards (1978) on which Quentino Tarantino based his own Inglourious Basterds.
Before the awards ceremony, Castellari met with students at Milan’s IULM University and reminisced with them about his own long career and inevitably the whole history of Italian genre films as well. A screening of the astonishing chase scene that is the start of the 1973 film High Crime served as a handy introduction to the themes and stylistic aspects of Castellari’s filmography. The son of a director, Castellari (whose real name was Enzo Girolami) learned the ropes on set with his father, director/producer Marino Girolami, picking up all the tricks of the trade.
In fact, Castellari himself would introduce myriad technological and stylistic innovations to Italian genre films, changes that would become his hallmarks, like the zoom, slow motion, refraction, and a certain style in editing scenes and using music. "I came up with the scenes in a film so they’d be visually appealing to the audience, just as they are to me."
Naturally, American films were his muse, starting with Sam Peckinpah: "I don’t think there’s a single frame of The Wild Bunch that I didn’t steal," he admitted. Auteur heists that would get Castellari in trouble with Paramount, concerned as it was about the release of Jaws 3, shortly after Castellari’s hit film Great White (1981).
Despite his triumphs abroad, which meant Castellari was hobnobbing with major stars like Robert Redford, Paul Newman e Clint Eastwood, he was grandly ignored by critics in Italy for years, his films accused of being ‘fascist’. "My grandfather was killed for having a picture of Matteotti [Mussolini’s opponent], so there were no fascist sympathies in my household, but as a film director I always refused to take sides, and I paid the price for being apolitical."
