Sara Quattrocchi Febles

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Sergio Strizzi: The Perfect Moment, The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 15 May–8 September 2024

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Traditional Italian restaurants have a distinctive style: the wooden tables wrapped by chequered tablecloths, the house wine served in carafes, and the walls decorated with black-and-white stills from old Italian films. As we picture ourselves sitting at one of those tables reading through the menu, debating which antipasti we should order to share and if we’re feeling like getting a primo, a secondo, or why not both, we might take a moment to look up at those pictures on the walls. More often than not, we’ve probably already seen some of these film stills in other Italian restaurants – maybe it’s the celebrated scene of Alberto Sordi playing Nando in An American in Rome (1954) as he tries to speak with a mouthful of maccheroni; or maybe it’s a picture of Totò playing the famished Don Felice stuffing his pockets with spaghetti in Poverty and Nobility (1954).

Photographer Sergio Strizzi shot Totò – or Don Felice in this case – with his spaghetti-filled pockets in Poverty and Nobility. Strizzi captures Totò’s signature comical expression in the photograph, even though he is performing as someone else. “You never think about the person behind the camera,” Strizzi’s daughter, Melissa, tells me as she looks up at the wall in front of us, where the photograph is hung. With her sister Vanessa, we find ourselves sitting on a bench at the Estorick Collection, surrounded by photographs taken by their father.

Beginning his career as a self-taught photo reporter for Italy’s Publifoto agency, Strizzi received his first film commission in 1952. From then until the early 2000s he took photographs on more than 100 film sets in Italy – from The Last Judgement (1961) and The Eclipse (1962) to Life is Beautiful (1997) – and internationally – on the sets of Zorba the Greek (1964), Escape to Victory (1981) and The Godfather III (1990). Approximately eighty of Strizzi’s photographs, spanning his entire career, are on display at the Estorick Collection as part of the exhibition The Perfect Moment. “Eighty might seem like a lot, but it really isn’t in comparison to what we have in the archive,” Vanessa tells me. The Strizzi sisters have worked with the Estorick Collection to select and showcase the photographs that best define their late father’s career for the first time in the UK.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the process to develop, print and edit films was lengthy, a film producer needed film set photographs to be able to receive funding and sell it to a distributor. This meant that for every scene, the photographer needed to guarantee a shot along the cine camera’s axis, capturing every action exactly as envisioned by the director. “Our father would take the photographs that were required of him, but then he’d take his own,” Melissa explains. “Many of his photographs are a challenge to the light of the director of photography. He would take his photographs from different angles, ones that he thought showed the actors in a more unique light.”

On each film set he worked on, Strizzi would patiently wait for the perfect moment. From his intimate close-up of Monica Vitti and Alain Deloin embracing on the set of The Eclipse (1962), to the bird’s eye view of singer-songwriter Domenico Modugno performing from a balcony in Naples for The Last Judgement (1962), it’s easy to forget that these were taken on artificially constructed, curated film sets. We might even picture ourselves in these worlds, longing to passionately embrace a lover like Vitti with Deloin, or to live in an idyllic Naples where Modugno would serenade us. Yet, neither Vitti, Deloin, nor Modugno are performing themselves in these scenes – Vitti and Deloin act as the protagonists Vittoria and Piero in The Eclipse and Modugno plays an unnamed Neapolitan singer in The Last Judgement. In a similar way to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of ‘the decisive moment’, Strizzi would wait to find the exact instance to perfectly frame the film stars, capturing them in the threshold between their real personas and the characters they personified, both within the specific scenes but also outside of them. By capturing this tension, Strizzi reveals the actors as real people living within our world, and not untouchable beings that we can only access from a distance through a film screen.

For The Great War (1959), Strizzi photographs Silvana Mangano performing as Costantina – the prostitute of the Italian village where the film is set – in a scene where she shampoos her hair, cheerfully singing, until Milanese soldier, Giovanni (played by Vittorio Gassmann), barges into her room. Strizzi shoots Mangano in between filming multiple takes of the same scene, catching her with a serious expression and alert eyes looking beyond the photograph’s frame. “Once he’d take the required photographs, he’d move around the set like an angel. No one would see or notice him. He managed to camouflage himself to capture the perfect moment,” Melissa adds. While director Mario Monicelli films Mangano transforming into Costantina in The Great War, Strizzi catches the real actor in conversation with the fictional character she performs. He reveals the thin divide that exists between the character’s persona and the real actor beneath, reminding us that they aren’t one and the same.

When watching a film, we often forget that what is depicted isn’t reality but only a reflection of it. We convince ourselves that we know the people we see on screen, choosing to connect with them on an emotional level, unable to separate the actor from the character. It becomes easier to see the storylines performed on screen as real rather than fantasy, as we might see our own lives reflected in them. With his photograph of Mangano, Strizzi reveals the separation between the real actress and the made-up character, showing the interplay between fiction and reality and reminding us of the complex space where actors live between the public eye and their private domain.

Another actress Strizzi often photographed was Sophia Loren, someone who we might see framed on the wall next to Alberto Sordi and Totò in a traditional Italian restaurant. Even though she may have appeared more recently in the film The Life Ahead (2020), directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, she’s fixed in our collective memories as one of the divas from the golden age of Italian cinema. Strizzi photographed her signing autographs on the set of The Gold of Naples (1954) and preparing herself for a scene dressed as Cleopatra in Two Nights with Cleopatra (1954), capturing her in an unfamiliar light away from her carefully curated public persona. By photographing her as she gets ready for a scene, Strizzi catches Loren in an unexpected way, away from the celebrity she represents in the public eye through magazine covers and paparazzi photographs and even further away from the fictional characters she performs in films. “Strizzi photographs these actors that we’ve grown up with in new ways,” says Clara Caleo Green, founder of CinemaItaliaUK and a friend of Strizzi. “With his quick eye, he captures them naturally and genuinely.” Strizzi distances Loren from her carefully curated and picture-perfect poses, reminding us that the untouchable and glamorous persona that we idealise through the movie screen might not be a real and true reflection of her beyond it. Loren is neither the multitude of characters she has portrayed in her lifetime nor the celebrity posing on the cover of magazines, but maybe someone completely detached from either spotlight.

With the dawn of paparazzi culture in the noughties, the immediacy of digital photography, and the constant influx of images on social media, we have become accustomed to having ready access to the private everyday of celebrities. As a result, we have started spending more time critiquing their private lives rather than focusing on the creative performances we may see on screen. Through Strizzi’s photographs, we are reminded of the greater distance that there used to be between spectators and actors. We become nostalgic for this romantic cinematographic past when we would only be shown small glimpses of the real-life personas of film stars, craving a time when their real personalities and lives were never fully revealed to us.

In another photograph, Strizzi captures Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as they walk up a hill in one of the last few scenes of the film The Night (1960). Moreau plays Lidia, Giovanni’s (played by Mastroianni) alienated wife who only wears black and bears a somber expression throughout the film. In contrast, Strizzi photographs Moreau wearing a white fur while laughing with Mastroianni. “It’s an intimate image of two friends, two colleagues, who despite working until sunrise, laugh,” Melissa says. For a brief moment, they are no longer framed by their celebrity personas, but rather, are two friends caught genuinely enjoying themselves.

Yet, as we look at these pictures from a temporal and spatial distance, it becomes more difficult to separate the actors from the fictional characters they play. We can’t help but see Mastroianni through the lens of his character of Marcello in La Dolce Vita or think of Monica Vitti as the unsettling icon in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. As we rewatch these films time and time again, the complex characters these actors have played become fixed in our collective memories, replacing who they may have really been beyond the screen.

As we see them depicted through Strizzi’s photographs and are reminded of the cult films of Italian cinema, we not only imagine the characters and actors fixed in time but also the romantic Italian worlds many of these films portray immortalised in space. “Italian postwar films, like Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D (1952), told stories of poverty and dreams, while cinema from the 1960s, particularly La Dolce Vita (1960), contributed towards a stereotyped image of Italy and Italians; the classic Italian man who likes to spend his day at the bar, or flirting with pretty girls,” Caleo Green tells me.

“In films, directors show us their way of visualising the world. As spectators, we can choose to agree or disagree according to our own experiences,” Caleo Green reflects. “Is what’s projected on the screen an accurate portrayal of reality or is it not? We each might have a different answer according to our own perceptions.” For Strizzi, the photographic lens was his way of materialising his understanding of the world, creating new untold narratives on film sets and revealing the fine line that exists between fiction and real life, fantasy and reality.
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Sara Quattrocchi Febles is an arts and culture writer and translator from Spain and Italy. She has a BA in History of Art from The Courtauld and has written for publications including i-D, Scomodo, Art Monthly, and Elephant. Most recently, she edited Issue 3 of the photography-based publication Two Italian Rascals titled ‘American Dream’. She can be found on Instagram at @saraqf_.