Cavani, Liliana

(1933-)

   Director. Cavani began her career in cinema in the early 1960s with a prolific series of television documentaries on a wide variety of historical and social themes. Her first feature film, Francesco d'Assisi (Francis of Assisi, 1966), displaying the strong influence of Roberto Rossellini, was originally made for television on 16 mm film but eventually shown out of competition at Venice in 1967 to warm acclaim. Her next film, Galileo (Galileo Galilei, 1968), was also made for RAI television but, rather inexplicably, was rejected as unsuitable for general viewing and so was never shown on the small screen. I cannibali (The Year of the Cannibals, 1969), a provocative modern rendition of the Antigone story, was made with obvious allusion to the student uprisings of 1968. Then L'ospite (The Guest, 1972) explored mental instability and social marginalization, while Milarepa (1974) cast a rather romantic eye on Oriental mysticism. However, it was her highly controversial Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) that brought her to international renown, followed by the similarly disputed Al di la del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977), a film about Lou Andreas-Salome's amorous affair with both poet Paul Ree and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. She continued to raise controversy with her adaptation of Curzio Malaparte's wartime novel, La pelle (The Skin, 1981), but returned to more religious themes with Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi, 1989), made entirely in English and starring Mickey Rourke in an uncharacteristic role. After Dove siete? Io sono qui (Where Are You? I'm Here, 1993), which highlighted the problems of the hearing impaired, and Cavalleria rusticana (1996) and Manon Lascaut (1998), two operas for television, she made the internationally successful Il gioco di Ripley (Ripley's Game, 2001), an adaptation of a popular Patricia Highsmith novel that starred the inimitable John Malkovich.

   Cavani returned to television in 2005, directing De Gasperi, l'uomo della speranza (De Gasperi, Man of Hope, 2005), a miniseries on the life of the influential Italian postwar statesman. In 2005, after many years of being underappreciated as a director, Cavani was awarded the prestigious Fellini Prize for her career in cinema.