When she arrived at the British border off the ferry from France in 1951, Lorenza Mazzetti’s Italian passport was stamped with ‘Undesirable Alien’.i That she later received financial support from the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund and had her first feature screened at the National Film Theatre speaks to her extraordinary ability to blend into both a social system and a cultural industry that she initially knew only from the outside, as a migrant to the UK. While studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, Mazzetti swapped drawing for filmmaking after discovering some equipment stored in the Film Society room: “Here there’s everything one needs to make a film. Camera, tripods, film, lights, everything.”ii She took the camera, cast fellow students and random strangers as her actors, and learned to direct and edit as she went. In her diary she recalls shooting her first short film and asking herself: “Who am I then? What am I doing here? This is not my country or my home; I have no one left in the whole world, everybody’s dead.”iii With no plan and no money – all the unpaid bills were sent to the Slade’s administration – Mazzetti created K (1953), a film “suggested by the work of Franz Kafka”.iv
Mazzetti’s adaptation of Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis (1915) closely follows the original story: upon waking on a regular workday morning, travelling salesman Gregor Samsa finds that his body has been transformed into that of a beetle, although in Mazzetti’s telling no one else can see this. In the original novella the change is meant as an attack on stringent societal expectations, but by Mazzetti’s time, the alienation that Kafka observed had been internalised to the point that it had become hard to detect and even more impossible to overcome. But Mazzetti also had to shoot on the cheap. No cash for a cockroach costume means that Gregor Samsa’s (Michael Andrews, her fellow student at the Slade) early-morning troubles look less like a supernatural event and more like a run-of-the-mill case of burnout. A distressed Gregor in his pyjamas, unable to get out of his room or even off the floor, is enough to provoke his family’s disgust without the need for a segmented black carapace. In a later sequence – a glimpse of his past daily professional activities – Gregor’s hectic movements evoke a beetle flipped on its back, limbs flailing like arthropod legs, and his work suit resembles a wearable cage. Mazzetti’s Gregor gushes with bureaucratese and blather. He follows his boss around, pleading for a raise: “I hope you will continue to exercise your trust in my favour, sir. My mother and father and sister are more than happy to know that I have accomplished my task in a satisfactory way and that my position in your firm is continually becoming more secure, so that we may look forward to the prospect of a better future.” Gregor’s jargon buzzes off into unintelligible, then inaudible, nonsense. At the film’s climax, Gregor toes his way like a tightrope walker along the rooftop railings overlooking the city, the two bulky travelling salesman’s suitcases he carries serving as counterweights. It is unclear whether his little jumps are happy hops or suicidal bids.
Gregor’s alienation struck a chord with Mazzetti. When explaining her project to Andrews, Mazzetti told him: “Gregor, a social outcast, turns into the accuser through his death. […] There are people whose souls are sick, who at times cannot find the energy to live. Like me, for instance.”v Mazzetti’s distress is translated through blunt cuts, extreme close-ups, and a jumpy, non-linear narrative; her offbeat editing suggesting what alienation feels like, not just as an individual but as a migrant, a non-native resident and speaker. In December of 1953 a screening of K was organised for Slade students in order to recoup the production expenses Mazzetti had debited to the school’s account.vi The screening was a great success. Denis Forman, the director of the BFI, was present and invited Mazzetti over for tea, offering her full backing for her new project: an adaptation of Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys (1906) transplanted to London’s East End. This time Mazzetti decided to approach alienation literally, rather than entrust narrative propulsion to a symbolic shell. The result, Together (1956), is a bitter parable, a quasi-documentary account of day-to-day survival. A pair of friends, both deaf and mute, share walks and lodgings as they navigate life in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood. “I knew what I wanted to do. These two men cut from the noise. To cut their world… Silence.” Mazzetti explained in a 2013 video interview.vii “It’s not a documentary: it’s a symbolic, poetic film. The meaning is not to show the East End, the meaning is to show the outside. The meaning is that the two deaf-mutes represent innocence in front of the rest of the world. Perhaps [the film] is a way to cancel the tragedy, to elaborate the tragedy. I didn’t want to give, with my film, a bad view of the world, but a good view of the world; to save innocence against the rest.”
By the time Mazzetti had secured BFI funding for Together, she already had Andrews in mind as the lanky co-protagonist. The artist, sculptor and Pop Art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi, on the other hand, was a promising artist Mazzetti had met by chance at a Francis Bacon exhibition.viii She cast him as the stouter of the two deaf-mutes. We can only speculate as to the varying forms of legal and geographical alienation that may have drawn Mazzetti and Paolozzi together. Paolozzi was a British citizen with an unequivocally Italian name; a Scotsman whose parents had left rural Lazio to open a gelato parlour in Edinburgh, but who had sent young Eduardo back to Italy over the holidays to attend summer camps run by the Opera Nazionale Balilla, a Fascist youth organisation which aimed to turn boys in black shirts and toy muskets into “tomorrow’s Fascists”.ix Yet the bond that Paolozzi may have struck with Mazzetti has left no identifiable traces in either artist’s legacy. There is no evidence of whether the two ever saw a connection between the slaughter of Mazzetti’s adoptive Jewish relatives by an SS commando in occupied Tuscany in 1944x and the fact that Paolozzi’s father had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean when the Arandora Star, a cargo ship assigned with deporting Italian and German civilians expelled from the UK after Mussolini’s declaration of war, was torpedoed in July 1940. Mazzetti and Paolozzi were not the only ones among their peers who had been traumatised by the war. Mazzetti, for instance, voiced her regret for having been unable to address her (and her friends’) communal pain: “I regret not telling anyone about my childhood,” is the closing remark of her diary.xi She could have shared her story, she notes, with her friend, director Karel Reisz, a Czech-born Jew who had come to the UK in 1938, on the Kindertransport. “This is the mystery of survivors: that is, the need – at first – to forget in order to survive, and then the guilt because one has forgotten and therefore did not bear witness to the horror.”xii
Mazzetti’s films do not reflect the trauma of the war directly, but engage with a different kind of alienation, one whose origins are firmly rooted in migration and its policing rather than dictated by historical events or individual circumstances. The Italian diaspora has no primary role in Mazzetti’s exploration of linguistic and cultural detachment, since the dislocated subjectivities of Together appear to move through a common pool of difficulties. A deaf person risks being run over when moving through city traffic because the warnings are acoustic; similarly, the embargoed knowledge of everyday know-how constitutes a real danger for migrants, expats, refugees and foreigners who are not fluent in the ‘right’ language. The protagonists’ speech and hearing impairments are both literal and allegorical: they encapsulate the difficulties that marginalised individuals, especially those kept at a distance by ableism and xenophobia, regularly face. Halfway through Together, Paolozzi and Andrews stand in the way of a van until they are visually shouted at by its driver (who has to get out of his vehicle and tap Paolozzi’s shoulder in order to make them aware that they are preventing his passage): the invisibility of their disabilities increases their vulnerability. Mazzetti displays the struggles of a body whose brain is wired for a different language; the short- and long-term consequences of constantly living on the edge. The marginalised experience she portrays is made to overlap with other attempts to survive unkind or hostile environments. Despite this, Mazzetti’s search is distinctly apolitical: she may address the symptoms of a systemic absence of care, but does not venture to suggest the larger causes behind the alienating forces that afflict her characters. It seems that Mazzetti preferred to sense her way through discouraging landscapes than theorise about the reasons behind this journey.
Mazzetti developed her filmmaking skills alongside her friends and fellow filmmakers, who also took part in each other’s projects. Together first screened as part of the Free Cinema collective programme.xiii According to Lindsay Anderson, this name was simply “a label of convenience”,xiv bait for the press that the young directors who founded the movement – Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Mazzetti herself – used to promote a programme that included their recently completed experimental and documentary short and medium-length work. Limited resources not only meant that their work was unlikely to become commercially significant, it also dictated a makeshift and often sparse approach. In a statement used as programme notes for a subsequent Free Cinema screening in May 1957, ‘Free Cinema 3’, the committee argued that with funds and equipment as scant as theirs “You cannot make a feature film, and your possibilities to experiment are severely restricted. But you can use your eyes and ears. You can give indications. You can make poetry.”xv Following these principles, Mazzetti and her peers developed a fiercely independent family of film-thinkers, whose work blended a confessional mode with socially-minded, everyday observations. Free Cinema grouped without binding, suggesting unity without forcing it. The first screenings were held at London’s National Film Theatre in February 1956 and, along with Mazzetti’s Together, the programme included Anderson’s O Dreamland and Momma Don’t Allow, co-directed by Reisz and Richardson. The programme was met with great critical acclaim: its tangible ‘independent’ streak – the capacity to work outside the mainstream British film industry – was so well received that the movement came to signify, in Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard’s words, “a template for a transnational, transcultural approach to filmmaking”.xvi A lack of interest in plot-driven narratives is a common feature, along with modest subjects: a day at Margate’s Dreamland amusement park; a regular Saturday evening at a north London jazz club. Lyricism is often conveyed through the use of non-verbal sounds: environmental noises, scraps of overheard conversations, or parts of music that were recorded live, but which do necessarily match the visuals. (In an article on Free Cinema, Christophe Dupin notes that before the 1960s synchronised sound recording would have been technically impossible to achieve outside a studio.)xvii This, along with a commitment to portable cameras and a highly sensitive film stock that didn’t need additional lighting all contributed to Free Cinema’s trademark “aesthetic of economy”.xviii The results are eerie: the subjects portrayed are pressed into thumbnail studies of normalised alienation, but the documentary value of the films gives way to each director’s poetic and singular understanding of the resulting pain.
“Mazzetti’s films do not reflect the trauma of the war directly, but engage with a different kind of alienation, one whose origins are firmly rooted in migration and its policing rather than dictated by historical events or individual circumstances”
Together’s gappy soundscape operates in a similar way. What we hear has both documentary and poetic purpose. Playground rhymes bounce around the public streets where children play unsupervised, their eeny meeny miny moes covering up the sound of Paolozzi and Andrews’s steps along brick walls and waterway bridges. Children’s songs and shouts are, incidentally, the only human vocal sounds recorded. The thumps, clashes and whirs that come from the docklands and warehouses are evidence of a marine industry whose presence not only indicates the working class character of the borough, but is also witness to the East End’s status as a major target in the 1940 German Blitz air-bombing campaign. Cutting room interventions, however, splice and erase these natural sounds. There are abrupt cuts into Paolozzi and Andrews’ hollowed acoustics: the immersive silence of diegetic deafness is thickened by the hissy interference recorded on the reel’s magnetic band. Daniele Paris’s musical score is a twitchy dialogue between violin and oboe, the aural correlatives, respectively, of Andrews and Paolozzi’s body shapes, as well as the only dialogue the two can engage in. The gesticulated conversations that take place between Paolozzi and Andrews are pure performance: their hands make no attempt at mimicking authentic sign language and are in no way intelligible. In fact, the ambiguity and frustration that comes with every linguistic or para-linguistic exchange in Together at times risks hindering the narrative. There is no sense of continuity, past or future, surrounding the pantomime Mazzetti sets up, and the asynchronous soundtrack is useless when it comes to making the de facto silent film any chattier.
It is hard to tell whether Mazzetti was aware of the ableist implications of her rushed and impressionistic sign language. Still, it is perhaps unfair to retroactively demand the kind of conscious and sensitive treatment of disability that we hope for in our own time. In the context of Together, deafness is employed metaphorically: a signifier for personal, unbridgeable alienation. The final result, however, relies heavily on an audience’s willingness to read one kind of marginalised experience as a stand-in for another, while still recognising its material implications.xix Yet Together’s gestural poetics turn into a factual, material narrative when the titular togetherness is disrupted: Paolozzi and Andrews’s friendship is undermined, literally, by their incapacity to hear. In the ending sequence Andrews is pushed into a canal by a gang of children, but cannot shout for help as he struggles in the water. Paolozzi, meanwhile, stands waiting for his friend on the bridge and doesn’t notice him floundering in the water below. Unable to hear him scream, it is an additional cruel irony that Andrews’s body is dragged by the current to a place where Paolozzi would not think to look. The camera’s all-encompassing viewpoint makes their failed interaction painfully evident: despite all the communicative inventions that brought them together, the two friends are, in the end, torn apart by a mere manipulation of their field of view. The concluding shot reverse shot between Andrews and Paolozzi, who lose each other despite being so close, within hearing distance but out of sight, is encapsulated in the final panoramic view of the barges at work on the river Thames – business as usual. The film ends with a shot of the water, something which derails the fulfilment of its narrative: the companionship that tentatively provided a way out from alienation is blotted out. The water is an unreflective surface, a barrier that prevents any further possibility of contact.
By the summer of 1956 Mazzetti had left the UK. After Together received a Mention au Film de Recherche in the short film competition at Cannes that year, Mazzetti took a break to visit her twin sister and new-born niece in Florence. Back in Italy, her dormant depression and PTSD kicked in: she couldn’t eat and began to have suicidal thoughts.xx The memory of the deaths she had witnessed during the war – the execution of her aunt Cesarina Mazzetti and cousins Luce and Annamaria Einstein, followed by the suicide of her uncle Robert Einstein – haunted her.xxi Therapy helped, as did drafting her first autobiographical novel, Il cielo cade (The Sky Falls, 1961, published in English by Bodley Head in 1962, tr. Marguerite Waldman). In the following years Mazzetti resettled permanently in Rome, and wrote two more volumes of biographic fiction, Con rabbia (Rage, 1963, published in English by Bodley Head in 1965, tr. Isabel Quigly) and Mi può prestare la sua pistola per favore? (‘Can I Borrow Your Gun, Please?’, 1969, never translated). While her award-winning literary production in the sixties tended to dissimulate its biographical content under the guise of fiction, Mazzetti’s later output embraced a first-person, quasi-diaristic narrative mode.xxii One of her most recent works, Diario londinese (2014, published in English as London Diaries by Zidane Press in 2018, tr. Melinda Male), is a mock-diary about Mazzetti’s London years. It is as if Mazzetti is determined to edit out all the boring and useless bits in order to reach the happy ending a little faster. Consequently, the journal entries read like a succession of great casual encounters, influential friendships and unfailing offers of help. Whenever she falls into hardship (which is often, given her flagrant lack of planning) she inevitably finds her way out again. With her enchanted mode of storytelling, Mazzetti writes like she is trying to compensate for, or even rectify, the isolation she felt in London. This adds up to a sort of programmatic naivety: given the brazen and reckless nature of her choices it is sometimes hard to believe in the shy, ingénue part Mazzetti insists she played. Like her alienated film characters, young Mazzetti walks through an alien city. The gap between her and the rest of it is simultaneously dreaded and cherished. Alienation, is, after all, what propelled her observations and her art.
It can sometimes be painful to read about Mazzetti’s vulnerability as a young and unaccompanied foreign woman. The psychological and sexual harassment she chronicles in her diary is unrelenting and extremely candid. After describing an occasion on which a passer-by offered to walk her home, she comments: “That curse on girls, who just can’t walk around without being persecuted by preening men.”xxiii No matter how assertive her “no”s were, she still found herself feeling as if her lips, tongue, hands and breasts were being stolen from her, along with her soul, “snatched away in small pieces”.xxiv Mazzetti’s dreamy narrative mode may at times feel like an attempt to make persistent sexist misbehaviour more easily digestible: a way of coping with the trauma that opens up an unpleasant part of her daily reality to discussion. As before, Mazzetti’s film and literary work shows a gendered power imbalance yet does not venture to describe or analyse its structural rationale. Mazzetti may have never fully embraced an openly feminist political stance through her intellectual practice, but she did, at one point, attempt to look into the origins of gendered structural inequality. With her return to Italy after so many years spent in London, the shame-inducing traditional culture that fosters fear and cultivates docility in Italian women, especially lower-class ones, may have finally captured her attention.
Mazzetti’s penultimate released film was part of an anthology film Le italiane e l’amore (Latin Lovers, 1961), a movie made up of shorts “born out of the letters Italian women send to magazines to confess their everyday dramas”.xxv The film’s other ten directors were all men. Mazzetti’s short, entitled ‘I bambini, o: l’educazione sessuale dei figli’ (‘The Kids, Or: Children’s Sexual Education’, pictured above) comes after the grim opening episode, ‘Le ragazze madri’ (‘The Unmarried Mothers’) and at times almost feels like a commentary on it, highlighting a systemic lack of adequate information about sexual matters. Set in a field, Mazzetti’s short follows the games played by a mixed group of children. They play at being mothers with their dolls, at being doctor with one another, and run around. In one scene, they come across a couple having sex behind a bush. When the kids discuss what it means “to make love” they conclude “it means to kiss!” This is logical, too: after the boys have twirled around the girls to kiss them, the girls do the same among themselves. “My belly aches!” exclaims one of the patients, and the doctor answers “That’s because you are waiting for a baby; babies come from mothers’ bellies!” “If boys come from mothers’ bellies, then girls come from their dads’” one of the little girls replies. In Italian nouns for describing people collectively are always masculine. Bambini, therefore, means at once “babies” and “boys”, but it is also used to indicate a mixed group of children, even if girls outnumber boys. The girl registers this ambivalence and refuses to accept the masculine as neutral, finding instead an alternative explanation, one that makes labour and life shareable. Unknowingly, Mazzetti’s fictional girl introduces a crucial theme in the debate for a feminist Italian linguistics – how to dismantle the binary core of the language – while also helping her gender resurface from the erasure of the masculine neutral. Compulsory sexist grammar, however, is complemented by an evasive education: when one of the girls asks her mother whether it is true that babies come from bellies, her mother slaps her and cries “Babies are delivered by storks! It’s shameful to hear you say such things!” Her outburst ends the film. Although she regrets slapping her child, she concludes that “Children don’t need to learn such ugly things.”
“It’s important to have one love to stay alive,” writes Mazzetti in her diary.xxvi She had many. Her amorous taxonomy included friendships, sex, sisterhood, filial devotion, professional respect, artistic fulfilment and psychogeographical attachment.xxvii The repetition of the same concerns over her career, from isolation and displacement to family tragedy and inherited pain, never feels conceited or bland. She delved deep into her material while simultaneously retaining the naive acuity that is unique to her work. If Mazzetti explicitly processed her wartime trauma through her biographical novels and paintings,xxviii her films are more ambiguous, exploring feelings and moods as she experienced and suffered them. Her quest does not require the exact definition of these states. It was a communal validation of feeling and an understanding of the signifiers of pain that Mazzetti craved – not culprits or hypothetical solutions. It’s what happens in the daily lives of people who are lonely or made to feel isolated, what happens when survival mode loosens its grip, as in the case of K’s Gregor Samsa, or when the environment proves stronger than the individual, as in Together. Mazzetti’s answer may hide somewhere in the muffled experiences of the heartbreak she filmed, where the alienation she imagines is painful, at times violent, yet permeable enough to promise survival.
[i] Lorenza Mazzetti, Diario londinese (Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 2014), 11-12. All translations from Italian into English are mine. [ii] Ibid, 47. [iii] Ibid, 55. [iv] As stated in K’s opening titles. [v] Diario, 44. [vi] Henry K Miller, ‘The Slade School and Cinema: Part Two’, Vertigo, Spring 2007 https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-3-issue-5-spring-2007/the-slade-school-and-cinema-part-two/ [vii] ‘Lorenza Mazzetti on Paolozzi – A Filmed Interview at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art, March 2013’, https://vimeo.com/70631249 [viii] Mazzetti remembers her first encounter with Paolozzi in the same video interview. [ix] Eduardo Paolozzi interviewed by Frank Whitford, National Life Stories Artists’ Lives, Oral History, The British Library, 4 May 1994 https://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/TRANSCRIPTS/021T-C0466X0017XX-ZZZZA0.pdf [x] On 3 August 1944 a group of German soldiers shot Mazzetti’s aunt Cesarina Mazzetti and cousins Luce and Annamaria Einstein at their villa in Rignano sull’Arno, near Florence. The commando was searching for Robert Einstein, Mazzetti’s uncle, who had gone into hiding to escape the deportations of Italian Jews, and was living in the nearby woods at the time. Lorenza Mazzetti, her twin sister Paola, and their cousin Anna Maria Bellavite were locked in a room and spared, although it is unclear whether or not they witnessed the murder. The survivors were then locked in a garden shed and the house was set on fire. Robert Einstein eventually killed himself on 13 July 1945. [xi] Diario, 145.[xii] Ibid. [xiii] Free Cinema (booklet, ed. Christophe Dupin), 17, enclosed in Free Cinema (DVD box set, British Film Institute, 2006). Mazzetti also quotes the manifesto, in its entirety, in Diario londinese, 94-95. [xiv] Lindsay Anderson interviewed by Alexander Walker, Hollywood England. The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Orion Books, 2005) 26. [xv] As quoted in Scott MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2014) p. 150. [xvi] Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, “Lindsay Anderson: Britishness and National Cinemas” in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Issue 1, Summer 2011, p. 4. [xvii] Cristophe Dupin, “Free Cinema. Groundbreaking Documentary Movement of the late 1950s”, BFI Screenonline. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/444789/index.html [xviii] Ibid. [xix] Mazzetti writes in her Diario: “I realise that I don’t really want to make a film about the life of these people, I’d rather do a film about the uneasiness that feeling alienated from the world causes.” Diario, pp. 81-2 On the potential dangers of metaphors, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. [xx] Diario, pp. 126-132. [xxi] Mazzetti and her twin sister Paola are the subject of Friedemann Fromm’s 2017 documentary Einsteins Nichten (“Einstein’s Nieces”), in which they visit their aunt and uncle’s villa Tenuta del Focardo in Rignano sull’Arno, Tuscany, were the murders took place. [xxii] Il cielo cade won the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize for debut novels in 1961. [xxiii] Diario, p. 14. [xxiv] Diario, p. 15. [xxv] As stated in the film’s introductory sequence. Mazzetti’s last released film was part of the anthology film I misteri di Roma (Mysteries of Rome, 1963), but the print is unavailable or has been lost. [xxvi] Diario, p. 55. [xxvii] Mazzetti is the subject of biographic documentary Perché sono un genio! (“Because I’m a Genius!”) directed by Steve Della Casa and Francesco Frisari in 2016. [xxviii] Her 2010 exhibition Album di famiglia (“Family Album”) mixes text and flashy tempera copies of memories from her childhood and portraits of family members. The static succession of relatives eventually turns into visual testimony, which Mazzetti employs to further process the wartime trauma she inherited from her family’s slaughter.
Additional Sources: Giorgio Betti, L’italiana che inventò il Free Cinema inglese. Vita cinematografica di Lorenza Mazzetti, Piacenza: Casa Editrice Vicolo del Pavone, 2002. Shelley Boettcher, Lorenza Mazzetti: Free’, Luma Quarterly 13: 4, Summer 2018. https://lumaquarterly.com/issues/volume-four/013-summer/lorenza-mazzetti-free/; Marco Duse, Loving the Aliens: Outsiders, Foreigners and Uprooted Characters in Short and Experimental British Films, PhD dissertation, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 2013; Emanuela Martini, ‘Il Free Cinema’, Wikiradio, Rai Radio 3, 5 February 2019. https://www.raiplayradio.it/audio/2019/01/WIKIRADIO—Il-Free-cinema–e1bc2207-bc98-4854-b447-4cbd5694886c.html
We extend our thanks to Henry K. Miller for fact checking this essay.
Francesca Massarenti is a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and co-authors Italian feminist newsletter Ghinea.
