If there is a work that reveals what makes the greatness of a certain Italian cinema in the art of mixing authors and genre films, entertainment and political vision, it is that of contrasting and protean Damiano Damiani (1922- 2013), to which the Cinémathèque française pays a tribute that is all the more pleasing and essential as many of its films have still not benefited from a French edition on DVD/Blu-ray.
From Damiani we most often retain only the period, certainly essential, of the cinema of denunciation, echoing the clashes of an Italy in the turmoil of the years of lead. law of silence (The mafia makes the law), patriarchal domination (Alone against the mafia), corruption (Confessions of a police commissioner to the public prosecutor, with an imperial Franco Nero), this political vein already surfaced in his western The Chuncho, one of the best of its kind, and which, against the backdrop of the Mexican revolution, delivered an implacable anti-imperialist charge.
Abrupt, intense, crossed by sick energy and dominated by dry violence, these films contrast with his much less known first period, that of devious intimate chronicles, often adapted from literary works – the island of forbidden loves according to Elsa Morante, boredom and its diversion, eroticism after Alberto Moravia. Or other people’s wives, disenchanted nocturnal wanderings of husbands on the go, recalling the Vitelloni by Felini. A rarity to be discovered in theaters, on the sidelines of the retrospective.