Zurlini, Valerio

(1926-1982)

   Art critic, screenwriter, director. After graduating in law from the University of Rome, Zurlini began his film career in the late 1940s with a series of short documentaries on urban life. His first feature, Le ragazze di San Frediano (The Girls of San Frediano, 1955), based on a novel by Vasco Pratolini, was the first of several fine adaptations of literary works that would mark his relatively short but distinguished career and which would include Cronaca familiare (Family Diary, 1962), with which he shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, and Le soldatesse (The Camp Followers, 1965), the adaptation of a wartime novel by Ugo Pirro. After a profound but melancholic exploration of the doomed nature of love in both Estate violenta (Violent Summer, 1959) and La ragazza con la valigia (The Girl with a Suitcase, 1960), he made Seduto alla sua destra (Black Jesus, 1968), a fierce indictment of white colonialism in Africa but also a more general parable of man's inhumanity to man. He returned to explore further the precarious nature of love and interpersonal relationships in what was perhaps his most personal film, La prima notte di quiete (Indian Summer, 1972). Zurlini is probably best remembered, however, for his final film, a delicately wrought and intellectually complex adaptation of Dino Buzzati's novel Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars, 1976).