As chiselled as a portrait by Antonello da Messina, the cinema of Gianni Amelio has consistently confronted the Italian public with an image of its society that disturbs or shocks it. In a country where, for the past twenty years, most films have offered little more than enlarged screens for the formats and topics of TV programmes designed as vehicles for advertising revenues, Amelio has explored a series of repressed or prohibited themes—child prostitution, filial delation, Albanian immigration, fate of Southerners in the North—in ways that have always disconcerted expectations. Known abroad mainly, if not exclusively, for Il ladro di bambini (Thief of Children, 1992), his output has been spare: some ten films over a period of three decades. But each work has counted. Furious disputes over his last, Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998), are still smouldering.

Sometimes regarded as the only living descendant of neo-realism, in recent years Amelio himself has been at pains to discount the term. What, he often asks, did such radically dissimilar directors as De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti ever have in common? If there was a period when he invoked Rossellini as a model, he now treats ‘perhaps the most intelligent director of all time’ as an unattainable ideal, everything of which he himself is incapable.footnote¹ Stylistically, in fact, he owes most to Antonioni, from whom he learnt a certain visual language—above all, movement within the frame—and narrative technique: for example, the distinctive use of narrative tangent and ellipse. If it took some time for critics to realize this, it was because his subjects were so different. Where the occasion of Antonioni’s cinema is nearly always relations between the sexes, the most striking single fact about Amelio’s films—setting him apart from all the neo-realists, too—is their complete absence. No kiss has ever crossed his screen; he has even claimed he would not know how to film one. It is probably this abstention from what is, after all, the most popular of all cinematic themes, common to high and low forms alike, that has deprived Amelio of the international fame his predecessors enjoyed, and which he certainly merits—though this may also have something to do with a general marginalization of Italian films, for other reasons. Whatever the causes, there is no doubt that the world at large has yet to realize that Italy possesses a true successor to its greatest directors. Amelio’s originality, it might be said, is to have crossed the themes of De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti—all three, actually—with the forms of Antonioni. The result is something unlike any of them.

Amelio was born in a family ‘even lower than the working class’, in a tiny village in the Sila mountains of Calabria in 1945 (‘for the first time’, he says with a touch of coquetry, and ‘again around 1950 with the birth of Cinemascope’). His mother was fifteen and his father seventeen at the time. At the age of twenty-one, his father left for South America and ‘came back ten years later as poor as he started out’. Taken at first to films by his grandmother, his favourite adolescent viewing in the movie-houses of Catanzaro was Hawks’s Hatari!, though he was also struck by the alternative Cinemascope strategies of Kazan and Ray. Arriving in Rome at the age of nineteen, feeling acutely Calabrian, he found a job with Vittorio De Seta on Un uomo a metà (1965), then completed his apprenticeship working on spaghetti Westerns made in Spain, and advertisements for liqueurs and aperitifs, including a memorable performance by the singer Patty Pravo at Rome’s Stazione Termini amongst a whirl of trolleys. Later he spent a year doing publicity for Alitalia. Unlike Bertolucci and Bellocchio, who were only a few years older but came from well-off, intellectual families in Parma and Rome, he had no chance of making an early debut as a director, and even when he had started, his career was to be marked by long periods of waiting and interruption.

Amelio’s first breakthrough came when the classical cinema of movie-houses had already started to fall into an irreversible decline in Italy, as popular viewing became more and more attached to television. One consequence was that, as elsewhere, films were beginning to be produced directly for the small screen, and production was shifting to TV studios. Amelio’s debut, La fine del gioco (1970), made for television, was also about it. A journalist, played by Ugo Gregoretti, a famous TV reporter in real life, accompanies a twelve-year-old boy from an orphanage on a train journey back to the village where he was born, intent on making a documentary about him. Badgered by his questions, the boy suddenly gets off the train, discards his shoes and walks barefoot through the fields. The village at which they arrive proves to be as empty as the relationship between the film’s two main characters. La fine del gioco won immediate recognition for its treatment of a cynical and invasive journalism, and youthful rebellion against it. It appears to conclude with a return to an ancient and frozen past, without the possibility of change.

When the boy turns his back on his investigator, and makes off peasant-fashion into the countryside, we are looking at the founding image of Amelio’s own career. The scene condenses techniques and themes that were to become part of his cinematic signature: rigour of visual composition, linkage of pride and separation, destabilization of stereotypes of the South. Here already were aspects of the country that the media of the period never represented. Italian television was born in the studios of Turin at a time when you could still see signs that read ‘We do not rent to Southerners’, and actual differences of language and customs were so little understood that ‘mafia’ films were always dubbed in the Catania dialect because it was thought easier for Italians to understand.

La fine del gioco could be seen as a development of the line of De Sica and Comencini, and Amelio has certainly owed a debt to them. Italian cinema had, in fact, a long tradition of representing encounters between an adult and a child, in which the child is typically sharper and more mature, the older person weak and worn-out, frivolous or confused. This schema generated some of the most famous works of the postwar period, from De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves to Dino Risi’s Giovedì, a remake of the sixties. But by the time Amelio made his debut, children had disappeared from the screen, as the movie industry devoted itself to sentimental dramas, risqué comedies and political films. He was the first director of the new period to return to the child as an emblem of wider processes of radical change, a visual alarm to ‘the state of things’.

Amelio’s second film was also made for television, with state funding for experimental productions, for which Rossellini’s historical reconstructions of Louis XIV or Pascal had set the precedent. La città del sole (1973) takes as its central figure Tommaso Campanella, the Calabrian monk whose utopian vision of an egalitarian community in the seventeenth century anticipated many of the ideals of modern socialism. Amelio’s sympathy with Campanella’s revolutionary version of Christianity, accused of heresy by the Church, is plain. Collision with the feudal order preserved by Spanish rule in Southern Italy was preordained, and the film shows the increasing spiral of violence that resulted. Viewers are invited to reflect on the roots of cultural and economic oppression in the South. This was an extraordinarily bold departure for Italian television at the time, and Amelio was unable to make any more features for some years, teaching instead at the Centro sperimentale—the state film school—in Rome.