Lina Wertmüller

Lina Wertmüller (born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich on 14 August 1928) is an Italian film writer and director of aristocratic Swiss descent. In 1976, she became the first woman ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Directing with Seven Beauties. She is recognizable by her trademark short hair and white-framed sunglasses, a look she has retained since the mid 1960s.

Biography

Lina Wertmüller was born in Rome to a devoutly Roman Catholic family of Swiss descent. She was rebellious as a child and was expelled from more than a dozen Catholic schools. Although her father wanted her to become a lawyer she instead enrolled in theatre school.

After she graduated from school her first job was touring Europe in a puppet show. For the next ten years she worked as an actress, director and playwright in legitimate theater. During this period she met Giancarlo Giannini who would later star in all her major films.

Through her acquaintance with the Mastroianni she met Federico Fellini and in 1962 Fellini offered her a position as an assistant director on 8½. The following year Wertmüller made her directorial debut with The Lizards (I Basilischi), a film whose subject matter (the lives of impoverished southern Italians) would become a recurring motif in her later work.

Several other moderately successful films followed, but it was not until 1972 that Wertmüller achieved lasting international acclaim with a series of four movies starring Giancarlo Giannini. The last, and best-received of these, was 1975's Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Sette Bellezze), which earned 4 Academy Award nominations and was an international hit. Wertmüller was the first woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola are the only other female directors to have been nominated.

She was known for her whimsically prolix movie titles (which may be due to her long full name), for instance, the literal translation of the Italian title of Swept Away is "Swept away by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August". These titles were invariably shortened for international release. She has an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest filmtitle: Un fatto di sangue nel comune di Siculiana fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci e vino (a movie from 1979 with 179 characters better known under the international titles Blood Feud or Revenge)

Although Wertmüller has had a prolific career since, and is still actively directing, none of her later films have had the same impact as her mid-1970s collaborations with Giannini. Wertmüller was married to Enrico Job (died on March 4th, 2008), an art designer who worked on several of her pictures.

Laraine Newman impersonated Wertmüller twice on Saturday Night Live (see [1]).

Politics

In general, Wertmüller's films are highly reflective of her own political commitments, with the main characters either dedicated anarchists, communists, feminists (or all), and the main action centered on conflicts which are political or socio-economic in nature. Despite this, Wertmüller's films are rarely didactic, and often reflect her own iconoclastic sensibilities. Swept Away, for example, tells the story of a rich, liberated industrialist's wife finding erotic fulfillment only after being sadomasochistically "tamed" by a macho, communist deck-hand. The film earned the ire of orthodox feminists, one of whom asked in a review whether Wertmüller had now become "one of the boys".^{[citation needed]} Wertmüller has also been criticized for the gender dichotomy within her films which reflects a comical men-as-dogs/women-as-whores perspective.

Filmography

Bibliography

• Peter Biskind. "Lina Wertmuller: The Politics of Private Life" in Film Quarterly 28. (1974-5). 10-16.

• Bullaro, Grace Russo. Man in Disorder - The Cinema og Lina Wertmüller in the 1970s. ISBN 978-1-905886-39-5

• Déléas, Josette. Lina Wertmüller - Un rire noir chaussé de lunettes blanches. ISBN 978-1-4251-2755-8

• William R. Magretta and Joan Magretta. "Lina Wertmuller and the Tradition of Italian Carnivalesque Comedy" in Genre 12. (1979). 25-43

External links

• Lina Wertmüller at the Internet Movie Database