The remarkable and largely forgotten career of Lorenza Mazzetti (1927–2020), an Italian postwar emigrée who lived and made deeply personal films in 1950s London—earning the admiration of Lindsay Anderson and other prominent figures of the Free Cinema movement even as she went beyond their documentary concerns—is traced in this program organized by William Fowler of the BFI National Archive. Fowler writes, “Lorenza Mazzetti arrived in London from Italy in 1951. The survivor of a wartime atrocity in which her Jewish relatives were murdered, she quickly made friends with other artists. Though associated with Great Britain’s realist Free Cinema movement, her stark yet playful films, all shot on location in a bleak and battle-scarred London, take the form of psychodramas that were influenced by Kafka’s dark absurdity, the wartime horrors she had endured, and her distance from her twin sister still living in Italy. Mazzetti’s three deeply poetic avant-garde narratives, all newly preserved by the BFI National Archive, stand as a testament to her radical vision. Complementing these restorations is Brighid Lowe’s new film portrait.” Film descriptions are written by William Fowler.
Together with Lorenza Mazzetti. 2023. UK. Directed by Brighid Lowe. 54 min.
This intimate new documentary, featuring wonderfully colorful and insightful interviews with Lorenza Mazzetti herself, revisits her life of love, trauma, and creativity. Brighid Lowe and Henry K. Miller’s research for the film was instrumental in the rediscovery of Mazzetti’s The Country Doctor.
The Country Doctor. 1953. UK. Directed by Lorenza Mazzetti. 10 min.
Based on a short story by Franz Kafka, Mazzetti’s deeply poetic early film—which has been lost for more than a half century—is imbued with a surreal and melancholic religiosity, powerfully dislodging the independent filmmaker’s assumed connections to Italian Neorealism and Free Cinema. Ruined buildings and the lush countryside form the backdrop to a doctor urgently attending a sickly patient. But what is his affliction and how can the doctor help this “terribly wounded” young man? The only known surviving 16mm print of The Country Doctor was ultimately discovered in the archives of Amos Vogel and has been digitally preserved.
K. 1953. UK. Directed by Lorenza Mazzetti. 28 min.
Lorenza Mazzetti’s bleak, angular, and genuinely unsettling short film K was based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and made on equipment “borrowed” from the Slade art school. Artist Nigel Andrews crawls like a caged and restless animal in his cramped bedroom while outside, in a gray and unforgiving London, his double appears to be desperately trying to impress his boss.
Together. 1956. UK. Directed by Lorenza Mazzetti. With Eduardo Paolozzi, Michael Andrews. 48 min.
Eduardo Paolozzi, then on the cusp of fame as a Pop artist, and Michael Andrews play two deaf-mute dockworkers who negotiate a precarious, fearful existence amid the bombed-out rubble of postwar London’s East End. Jeered by children and seeking refuge from their threadbare bedrooms, they visit a raucous pub, a bustling street-market, and a funfair, but even the allure of sex offers them cold comfort. Supported by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, which enabled Mazzetti to shoot on 35mm, Together found success at the Cannes Film Festival.
Program 140 min.